Golden Calf

You clearly have no idea what academic criticism is. What she set out to do is a study of representations of women (or in this most recent case, violence against them) in video games. OF FUCKING COURSE that's what she focuses on, that's what she set out to look for in the first place. She's not trying to make a blanket judgment that: video games have violent scenes against women, they're terrible! Instead, the point is: hey, I studied gendered violence in games, and here's what I found - a lot of it is really gross, and used in a completely mindless way that exploits gendered violent imagery for cheap world/tension building. Could it be that you could say something similar about how violence against men is in games (not the sexualized part, as feelthedarkness pointed out)? Absolutely. But that's a complete non sequitur. It's not her responsibility to analyze the totality of games from whatever random perspective every gamer happens to think is important. She wanted to study a few issues, and has done so honestly. The points she makes, in the context she makes them, are completely robust. Welcome to how adult criticism works for media. This is how it has worked for decades for books, film, etc. This is probably not even worth commenting on, because it's so transparently ludicrous. I seriously doubt you believe that she wants sexually explicit harassment and death threats on an ongoing basis for several years in order to achieve fucking piddly internet 'fame'. SHE WAS ALREADY PAID FOR THE SERIES. The kickstarter is over. At this point, all she's doing is the work she promised and was paid for. Obviously, she hopes people watch it because she thinks it's important. It makes me very sad for you that your disagreement with her conclusions makes you so incapable of empathizing with her position.

Christ the God of War bit is horrible

I finally got round to picking up Bring Up the Bodies, and have been amply rewarded. Half-way through, it is said of King Henry: Surely the thumbs would have acquitted themselves well as royal councilors.

You can recalibrate from the menu. It really helps.

Thanks to the combination of a burst water main at work and a lowered difficulty for zone 3, I finally beat hardcore mode wooooo.

You seriously think the public has a legitimate interest in combing through an argument from her private relationship like this?

No, continuing to harp on this issue shows that you care about her WAY MORE than she is relevant to games journalism. This story is a tiny fucking footnote given the outsized influence that the massive publishers' marketing and PR departments wield in the industry. Even assuming, for sake of argument, that the worst things assumed about the situation are true, that she's some craven manipulator specifically trying to garner unfair coverage, the story is still tiny. This is for a tiny text adventure that received hardly any coverage even compared to other indie games. Trying to make this story a serious component in a broader problem within games journalism is transparently ludicrous. Even assuming it's all true (no particular reason to do so), the takeaway should be: ok, journalists should be careful about conflicts of interest, now onto much more serious issues of genuine quid pro quo arrangements that publishers make with youtubers, endemic ads on games press sites, stories like this from Robert Ashley, when he used to freelance in the industry, etc., etc., ad infinitum: Edit: adding more Robert:

Waaaaaah I love it : ( Steampunk though? Victorian gothic, sure, but it all looked pretty low tech to me...

God damn the environmental art looks so good. They've done a fantastic job making it feel more like a real place than the environments of the Souls games. It looks like they've done away with healing items in favor of regen through the blood of enemies you attack? I think I like that change if so. Man, I don't want to buy a console : (

Absolutely. The fact that there was nowhere near this sort of blowup about the ACTUAL quid pro quo arrangements that many youtubers engage in speaks volumes. Add to that all the crazy promotional stuff large publishers do for journalists, sending them shit, having them out to the desert to shoot guns for no fucking reason, etc., and THIS is what the supposed paragons of ethics choose to blow up over? Over a text adventure that got significantly less attention than your CODs and Battlefields, than even several other indie games? It's pretty obvious it's people who already hated Quinn and are using the incident to pile more hate on. So much more. It's despicable.

Yes, after transubstantiation occurs, it is the literal blood of Christ. Though, in this case I'd argue 'pretend' is entirely appropriate.

One of the sincerely coolest memories from my childhood is being an altar server at the 3 hour midnight Easter vigil masses and getting to manage the censer and incense.

Gormongous, sounds like I live like 2 miles from you, near Tower Grove/South Grand. I've been working this summer at a health care company in Maryland Heights, a predominantly white suburb about 10 miles west of Ferguson. The building has a lot of middle-aged white people working in finance and IT for the company, but also houses a call center for a pharmacy branch, which is staffed primarily by black people. The past few days, there have been these weird clumps of old white people whispering among themselves (of course they don't stop when I get close since I'm white) about Ferguson, almost invariably mentioning the one-off "riots" as if that justifies both the original incident and the insane police response that has followed. It's been fucking gross. It makes me so mad, I want to scream at them every time I see it.

I think if you watch for at least the first 6 minutes or so that it's pretty obvious that the Telltale folks' opinions are just not as clear cut as you're painting them. It turns out gifs don't capture a complex set of views in a specific context. And the segment discussing Sarah in particular was pretty brief overall. I bet if you sat them down they would have some decently well-thought out and nuanced ideas about her. The first thing they both immediately say when Miller says he had wanted to kill Sarah for a while is "Why?" They later ask "Do you think you would have done the same thing if you were Lee", pushing back on Miller's enthusiasm for leaving her to die. The line which DIRECTLY FOLLOWS the first quote you list is "But when it actually came down to it, you know, not everyone [let her die in the scene they're discussing]," referencing the near 50-50 split in player decisions. It seems clear to me that (whether they succeeded or not) they were trying to write an interesting character, and present a truly difficult decision. They don't at all seem to treat her with the disdain that the pullquotes alone imply. With regard to the second quote, the situation seems completely naturalistic and not malicious in any way. There have been many moments in my life when I'm frustrated with someone I care about because they're causing harm to themselves, and I want to slap them or yell at them or do something to bring them to their senses, precisely because I care about them. To me, they're describing a human experience of desperation coming from care for someone else. If I were in the interview, I may well have pushed back more. Maybe they're not perfect interviewees. Maybe they didn't want to protest too much because it's a sort of publicity opportunity. I don't know. But they definitely don't come off to me as racist or ableist monsters catering to the worst parts of their fanbase, that they covertly agree with.

I just don't think you can claim this. Unless I've missed something, there's been no indication that the writers killed the character because they thought she was annoying. It seems at least equally likely that she was planned to be disposable from the start, which I admit is probably less interesting than watching her develop, but tons of the WD characters are completely disposable. And even if that were the case, the race part seems like a strange protest against a series whose protagonists have been Lee and then Clementine. Even in the grosser parts of the community cheering her death, I haven't seen any significant racial animus. The writers have seemed to me to be on even more solid ground in that department. All the hatred for the character I've seen (admittedly, not tons) has been directed against her freezing and being 'useless'. Edit: I really don't think there's been enough evidence to conclude this. Why is this a more plausible reading than that the writers are trying their best to come up with interesting stories but wrote something you don't like? Awkwardly going along with a dudebro interviewer for publicity just doesn't seem to me like the strongest evidence of malice.

I think there's a pretty massive difference between characters A.) finding out someone has a mental illness and treating them as worthless out of hand and B.) valuing someone less in a life or death situation because their behavior (which may or may not be the result of a diagnosable mental illness) presents a consistent liability. I absolutely don't want to defend any elements in the community detailed in the tumblr posts, or the weird glee over a character's death that was welcomed by the Telltale folks in the interview, but the character and situation seemed perfectly reasonably drawn to me at the time and now after thinking more about it. The characters seemed completely naturalistic in how they acted in the episode. The walking dead has so many moments of people judging each other based on their characteristics and situations for whether that presents a liability to the group. Pregnancy, age, temper, the list goes on and on. It's one of the main drivers of the interpersonal drama.

Grok doesn't even seem to be adding anything useful. We have internalize.

I'm sure others have seen it, though I don't know if anyone else has posted about it. I remember checking it back when they put the site up, since I had basically just started learning javascript and was curious how they did it. Wizardry indeed.

A wizard does it. Well, a wizard() anyway.

Jesus zone 3 on hardcore is so difficult. My puny human brain can't come close to processing everything....

really? I remember liking them all a lot..... Caveat: je suis imbécile. Also btw, Xibalba is the underworld of a branch of Mayan mythology, which I know only because it featured heavily in Aronofsky's The Fountain. The between-level text in the game obliquely referenced it, but it seemed entirely divorced from the gameplay, and so vague as to be easily ignored.

Haha fair enough. Twitch has it even worse in that department, so I guess it's a match made in heaven.

I recently watched The Passenger, from 1975. The contrast between Jack Nicholson and today's Hollywood lead was striking, to say the least: I absolutely loved the Swedish version of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies because of how non-Hollywood all the actors looked. I think they're far superior to the American version (for a few other reasons also, but the casting really struck me while I was watching them). Also, how the fuck did they think "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was a better title than the original "Men Who Hate Women"?

I'm pretty sure the deal's already been done. Plus, I think they're after their technology more than their userbase. Youtube doesn't have a userbase problem.

I always enjoy the streams of Jonathan Blow and Jeff Green, though they only stream sporadically. It's tough to find streamers that don't seem to be rejected characters from Drake and Josh. Charlie Winsmore is generally pretty funny.