Bjorn

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Posts posted by Bjorn

  2. Posted

    I'm gonna post a weird good news thing thing, my wife with an opossum:

     

    I was letting our dogs out late at night a few weeks ago and one caught this little thing and shook it, it was already still before I scared it off. I thought it was a humongous rat at first, but it was a very young opossum. It's mouth was wide open so I figured it was really dead. It wasn't until I went upstairs to bother my wife about it until I realized it might be playing dead. So I had her go check it out and then tell me what I should do if it is dead, like toss it in the trash or get it tested or something in case of rabies or infection to the biting dog. She's a lead vet tech at a local vet hospital so I pretty just consult her on everything now.

     

    She thought it was dead too though because she picked it up and it was excreting tons of stuff out of it's anus and it seemed like rigor mortis set in. She put it in a little container since it was faintly breathing and we just started reading on in the internet about opossums playing dead. Apparently they really do play dead to an extreme degree, not like just flopping over for a bit until the animal goes away. Like opossums will stay in a catatonic state for hours, will secrete nasty liquid from it's glands to make it smell like a diseased carcass, and go completely stiff and have its eyes roll back.

     

    We put it in a nice dark cat bag with a blanket because we were sure it wasn't dead, went to sleep, woke up and saw it seemed fine and alive, and my wife took it to work to make sure the dog didn't injure it at all. It was fine, no bite marks and was weirdly nice. She came home and was just holding it like it was her new pet and then I held it for a bit and it didn't seem like it was interested in being vicious. Then we let it go in the backyard again and I hope it's safe out there.

     

    So opossums are really fucking good at tricking predators, like I am super impressed seeing this first hand. Also apparently they aren't aggressive and will avoid conflict. I guess I assumed they were aggressive because at my parents house growing up they used to invade our backyard for catfood and we had a large territorial killer cat who would fight them off, so it was always just these awful noises at night when it was most likely just the cat being the aggressor. Oh and you don't have to be afraid of rabies with an opossum because their temperature as marsupials is a few degrees lower than the usual mammal so they can't contract it in most cases (there's still a sliver of a chance).

     

    Anyway, it was ugly and it was cute! GOODNEWS!

    That's awesome! I'm actually quite find of opossums. We have a bunch that live around our property, and they've become quite unafraid of me, as I tend to hang out on the front porch at night and watch them go around the yard scavenging for stuff.

    The best though is that each of the last two years we've had a mother raccoon and her brood visit our mulberry tree on a regular basis. A bunch of young raccoons stuffing themselves on mulberries is the CUTEST!

  3. Posted

    Jesse Singal wrote a pretty standard takedown of gamergate for The Boston Globe, and got called out on it, with many people saying "POORLY RESEARCHED, GO TO KOTAKU IN ACTION TO SEE THE TRUE GAMER GATE" 

     

    So he did. And then he wrote a comment there about it. And it's great. 

     

    That reply to KiA is incredible. 

     

     

    He makes a distinction between SJWs and people.

     

    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):

     

    However, for individuals viewed as outside the scope of morality and justice, "the concepts of deserving basic needs and fair treatment do not apply and can seem irrelevant."[2] Any harm that befalls such individuals seems warranted, and perhaps even morally justified. Those excluded from the scope of morality are typically perceived as psychologically distant, expendable, and deserving of treatment that would not be acceptable for those included in one's moral community. Common criteria for exclusion include ideology, skin color, and cognitive capacity. We typically dehumanize those whom we perceive as a threat to our well-being or values.[3]

     

    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.

     

    Deindividuation facilitates dehumanization as well. This is the psychological process whereby a person is seen as a member of a category or group rather than as an individual. Because people who are deindividuated seem less than fully human, they are viewed as less protected by social norms against aggression than those who are individuated.[8] It then becomes easier to rationalize contentious moves or severe actions taken against one's opponents.

     

    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. 

  5. Posted

    I can scarcely believe I'm saying this, but I'm quitting Mass Effect 3. It's just too fucking long, and I think that, with the reapers on my doorstep, there's just not much that can be done to surprise me anymore. The combat is good - really good - but it's not enough on its own to sustain the whole experience. 

     

    I don't really care for the new characters. EDI is good fun, and I used her for most missions, but the others can go hang. Hell, I played for what must've been close to thirty hours and have seen a grand total of three new characters. Garrus is still Garrus, Liara is still boring me to death, and Kaidan? I should've put a bullet in his head when I had the chance (I didn't realise I actually did have the chance, and missed it, until I read about it on the wiki later on)

     

    Anyway, the straw that broke the camel's back was trying to paint a target on a reaper, in what was presumably supposed to be a climactic moment (if the rousing music was anything to go by) but which basically meant strafing left and right and trying not to wiggle the mouse about too much. This came just 20 minutes after the incredibly tedious Geth VI section, where the versatile and kinetic combat system is reduced to hunting for static, glowing blocks in a featureless maze of non-glowing blocks, so I just quit in bewilderment at the whole thing.

     

    I don't suppose I'll ever get to see what the furore was about the ending, but judging from the rest of what I played, I likely wouldn't have given a toss

     

    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. 

  6. Posted

    I have to admit, though, that when I started reading this thread yesterday, being unaware of any actual recent developments, I was kind of bothered by some people here taking single tweets or posts by one person and equating that to "gamergate says this", but I've now come to understand that if we were to not do that, it would appear as somehow giving legitimacy to some part of the movement, which should really be condemned entirely. There is no single thing worth saving about it. Their ethics concerns still haven't progressed much further from the Zoe Quinn "conspiracy".

     

    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. 

  7. Posted

    Most big animated, action, or sci-fi releases in the last few years have been 2.35:1 (though because of ~shenanigans~ most of those films are actually 2.39:1 or wider and are just referred to as 2.35:1).

     

    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. 

  8. Posted

    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.
     


    And this is David Kemper, executive producer. Just a word as we look back from July 2004 at “Jeremiah Crichton”. Every once in awhile on a TV series, especially one that is just starting up from scratch, you’re fumbling, you’re looking around, and as the show starts to gel, a magical event happens. Every once in awhile you reach an episode where everything comes together: the writing, the directing, the acting, all the production crafts. And you achieve a magic, magic, perfect episode. We’re here today to talk about “Jeremiah Crichton” cause it is absolutely Not. That. Episode.

     

    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. 

  10. Posted

    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.

     

    In many ways, that's been the most frustrating part. To watch talented folks like Jenn Frank get pushed right up to a breaking point and for the rest of us to have nothing better to combat this with than "hey, I know you think you're waging some kind of holy war and solving some kind of real-world issue but stop this" feels like the most empty and toothless statement around. It's easy to feel helpless and I don't have a real solution to this. I'm not sure that there is one, honestly.

     

    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.

     

    post-33601-0-18957500-1413654544_thumb.jpg

  12. Posted

    Given the amount of MRA language I've seen from Gamergate, I'd bet actual money the real grievance is that gaming has tolerated the presence of people who think that women are evil, because it never came up and there wasn't much reason to change. As gaming has become mainstream, there's been a move to change that, which genuinely does threaten gaming for them as a place where they can safely believe that women are evil and not be challenged.

     

    Let me tell you, it's frustrating reading these statements and seeing thoughtless reparroting that Gamergate might well be a movement about ethics in journalism. It never was. It's a smokescreen. We have proof of this. They made it up and we have the IRC logs from when they made it up. All of this information is available. Did they just not look hard enough?

     

    Also frustrating: Giant Bomb and others saying 'silence doesn't imply complicity'. You might want that to be true, writer, but we know both perpetrators and victims don't believe it. We know that abusive people justify their abuse because they're the vocal part of a silent majority. We know that victims respond in outsize ways to statements of support, even fairly banal ones (I've been there, I've personally experienced it).

     

    And I don't think statements saying 'don't harass people' mean anything because Gamergate doesn't believe it's harassing. It believes it's delivering justice and finally doing something about these evil women trying to take this safe space away from them. Which is why they can be "against harassment" but when someone suggests to prove it by donating to Zoe, Anita and Brianna, they recoil in horror.

     

    Also why has no-one interviewed that one guy on NeoGAF who realised Gamergate was a hate group?

     

    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. 

     

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  14. Posted

    Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply he's an idiot or anything.  He's clearly not familiar with the podcast and a single 20 minute segment is barely going to begin scratching the surface of what normally goes occurs.  He's not wrong to have the opinions or interpretation of Chris's words the way he did, he just doesn't have the whole picture and was probably expecting more of a formal critique than a casual one.

     

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

  18. Posted

    Then, we get to Josie.

     

    Sure, she's nominally Chinese from Hong Kong. But she's such a terrible 80's Japanese-sterotype pastiche. She's literally introduced by taking over a factory and shutting it down. Her terrible grammar and accent. Her wardrobe, which appears to be comprised entirely of silk / mesh kimono. It's just...*sigh*. I'm not one to look for racism as a general rule, but every scene with her in it is just cringes upon cringes.

     

    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.

     

    I have made countless stupid mistakes in life and wanting to be written out of Twin Peaks was among the stupidest. With the ignorance of my youth, and the influence of the PC factions in the Asian community, I naively rebelled against being an exotic flower. I believed that I should want to be something more meaningful. When I asked to be written out of Twin Peaks, I didn’t realize how impossibly precious the opportunity of being a beautiful Ming vase was. Unlike a real Ming vase, the value of which increases by the day, the human version, like a blossoming cereus, is only valuable for a few short hours. Couldn’t I have searched for meaning after my once in a lifetime bloom?

  19. Posted

    He says at the end that he may have been mischaracterizing Idle Thumbs which to me he was.  It seemed like he was expecting a podcast about games criticism instead of the goofy ramblings of a fun bunch of people who mostly talk about games.  Of course there's a lot of criticism in Idle Thumbs but I wouldn't say that's what the podcast is about, if it can even be said the podcast is "about" anything.

     

    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? 

  20. Posted

    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.

     

    The player is challenged to confront a long and complicated series of bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a recent change of address. Mail isn't being delivered, bank accounts are inaccessible, and nothing is as it should be. The game includes a measure of simulated blood pressure which rises when "frustrating" events happen and lowers after a period of no annoying events. Once a certain blood pressure level is reached, the player suffers an aneurysm and the game ends.

    While undertaking the seemingly simple task of retrieving misdirected mail, the player encounters a number of bizarre characters, including an antisocial hacker, a paranoid weapons enthusiast, and a tribe of Zalagasan cannibals. At the same time, they must deal with impersonal corporations, counterintuitive airport logic, and a hungry llama.

     

    Also: "You'd have to call the game gamergate." Fucking crying laughing.

  24. Posted

    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.