Deadpan

Speaking of silly people failing to deliver on silly promises, it's now officially been three months since the editor-in-goof of GG site goofgamers dismissed my attempt to fix some of the countless typos and grammatical errors in their attempt of an ethics statement on the grounds of "you sound mean" and "you're getting yourself worked up over what is clearly just an early draft (even though we've not marked it as such in any way)." I've been glancing at the site on occasion, and despite finding the time to add several more porn game reviews to their erratic collection, they have yet to deliver a "final" draft of their weaksauce ethics policy, which I guess means that the site is still officially an ethical no man's land six months into its tortured existence. So, keep that in mind the next time you see some goof championing that complete load of crap. The other big news being that Brianna Wu announced on Twitter that she met Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock and major GG douchelord discussed a few pages back) for coffee, and between this and her ableist discussion of GG at this point being reduced to only a bunch of psychopaths, it's probably time to recognize that her politics aren't all that great and just because GG hates her, we don't necessarily have to lionize her. Lana Polansky, of course, said great things about this on Twitter, primarily in this here tweet which sums up my feelings pretty well (You should all follow her because she's great).

I guess this is just more evidence of their spectacular talents of self-delusion, applied to convincing themselves that even though people have been rightfully dismissive of their complaints, they'll surely change their opinion if only they throw the exact same complaints at them a little more insistently. It's quite befuddling to any reasonable person, of course, but then this entire movement seems to be channeling the gross dude in a bar who thinks that somebody moving away from him and telling him to get lost is just playing hard to get. And while going home alone, he convinces himself that, no really, it was for the best (as GG has of course responded in the expected manner to their plan backfiring and gone "NO U AR A BACKFIRE" because widespread use of the autoblocker is going to end up hurting devs and "expose" media corruption... somehow).

If only though! We're really mostly doing either the thing that gets us paid or writing exactly the weird stuff we want to write whether people like it or not. Although, I do tend to think of RPS more as a smarter variant of the same basic formula as Gamespot, with the other end of the spectrum being the essayistic metacriticism that's more interested in depth than timeliness. (P.S.: Follow me on Twitter for regular plugs of Five out of Ten, ZEAL, The Arcade Review, Memory Insufficient, Meandrzine and anything by Jenn Frank, Lana Polansky, Mattie Brice, Soha Kareem and Cara Ellison!likecommentsubscribeeeee)

Yeah, that tends to happen when you follow the right kind of people since there's a lot of tweeting other people's work or just referencing ideas back and forth. I kind of imagine a lot of people are tired of seeing me bang the usual array of drums every so often, but sometimes you actually do get to point people towards something cool, and it's great. I don't know that this weird fusion isn't ultimately for the best (genuinely, because I tend to read more alt-crit than reviews, even good ones). He seems to like being there, and it's probably for the best if Gamespot's audience is introduced to a slightly different style of criticism than they might be used to. I always felt that even though I personally prefer the heady, academic stuff that roughly twelve people in the world care about, it's very important that there are also people who do quote/unquote mundane writing really well and bring something unique to it.

Yeah, Nick's fairly well known in critical circles, he's mostly chugging out reviews these days, but he's also got a book in the works, I think, and he helped Zoya Street organize that Critical Proximity event before GDC last year. Although, critics all tend to know each other always, so maybe my perspective isn't terribly helpful there.

Those are anagrams for you. For every ETHICS FARM and MR SHITFACE, there's about a hundred FA CHIT REMs. That was a pretty interesting, weird game, but the most substantial thing I took out of it beyond various references to 20th century Russia was a mediation on the relationship between player and game. It makes this point, I think, through a narrator that asserts itself opposite prose (or what has the makings of prose) as strongly as we are used to games making their influence felt. That's a bit far reaching of course, but the two nodes in the game that lead me on that trajectory are: - You being unable to alter anything in the first half of the game without the narrator yanking you back on track, quite violently even. - A fight scene that has absolutely no bearing on how the game continues. It allows you a minimal bit of self-expression in choosing how to perform the fight itself, but the canonical end result is always the same and the ultimately just shrugs that scene off and goes "now we resume the plot." There's maybe a bit more in there, even, about how that relationship and storytelling conventions shape our perspective, like the way the letter is being set up as significant by us being told how significant it is reads like it's flipping the usual script of games starting with just an ordinary day in the life of the protagonist, while we already know that it's obviously not going to be ordinary because the game won't actually make us play through one normal day and have the weird thing happen on the second day.

Haha, yeah, in his particular case the line about being garbage compared to developers is very accurate in most cases, unless you extend the definition of developers to shitheels like Wardell and Villena, who honestly can't have that much time left in their day for any genuine productivity between keeping the constant flow of garbage from their mouths going.

I know nobody is going to be surprised by TB saying shitty things, but it's honestly kind of amazing how many different flavors of crap he managed to stuff in that little rant. There's the completely disingenuous assertion that Leigh is somehow to blame for this, of course, this time including wildly inappropriate speculation about alcoholism. And there's the mind-boggling "Look at me sitting on my golden throne ruling over this fervently loyal audience, sure is nice eh?" levels of arrogance we've come to expect. But beyond that he also reveals that he holds the incredibly problematic opinion of considering developers his moral and intellectual superiors in every way (like really, your ethical champion here is somebody with that kind of deferential attitude to the thing he's supposed to be critiquing?) And just for a kicker he even manages to suggest that if you're unhappy with the state of something, you should keep your mouth shut, because speaking out makes you a bad person. Does this man even know what the word critic means?

I have some weird health stuff going on at the moment that, after ruling out other things, turned out to be most likely due to my liver and kidneys deciding that now would be a good time to get rid of some toxins and flushing those into my system. Which is a good thing, I guess, or certainly not as bad as some of the stuff I imagined, but it's still pretty annoying for feeling unwelcome in my body in the moment and having no control over when it ends. I've been trying to speed it along by eating healthy, but there's still no way to tell how long it'll last and the estimates I get from people who've dealt with this already are like "might be a couple more weeks!" I'd really prefer to be able to do the stuff I should be doing at the moment and not feel exhausted all day long for no reason :/

I didn't say the meaning was identical, I said that the function of these words is identical to those of other pronouns. That's because all pronouns everywhere are used for the same purpose and fulfill the same grammatical and syntactical functions. There's difference in usage, and meaning, but the only functional difference these new pronouns have to old pronouns is the combination of sounds and letters needed to produce them. (I did call this the only meaningful difference, but only because it was the only difference relevant to your specific complaint)

I think there were several things being discussed here, one of which was asking about pronoun preferences, another was neutral pronouns, yet another was the creation of new pronouns, and then I introduced concerns about entirely individualistic approaches to a pronouns becoming more common and how that might affect language, which derailed everything a little bit. My bad. But its functionality is exactly the same as other pronouns! There is no change in when you'd use them, or how, the sound and spelling are the only meaningful differences.

I am though. And I'm really sorry if I looked like I was just responding hesitantly to the idea of one person coming up to me and asking me to respect their expertise over their own identity, I guess I should have been more clear about this being less informed by the example here and more by some of the more radical ideas I've come across on this subject, but this is why I'm trying to make clear pretty desperately how largely hypothetical my concerns about such a fundamental change are, seeing how they depend on marginalized folk getting all their wishes. Even then it's pretty cynical of me to focus on one potential downside of this queer, post-gender wonderland being that its language would seem kind of complicated by current standards. Oh, it's also worth noting I guess that this is partly informed by me speaking German, where we don't have the benefit of an established neutral pronoun, which has mostly led to using both male and female pronouns at once seperated by a slash (not ideal from a non-binary perspective), but also to ca. twelve different concurrent suggestions for a word that could take that place. And since we also still use gender-specific articles, all of those come with their own neologisms for that class too.

Not wanting to dig myself in any further here, I'm not convinced they are entirely equal on that matter (although my linguist cred is flimsy undergrad stuff). If there's no benefit to it, why come up with a pronoun system in the first place rather than just using names all the time forever? The difference is completely minor, I'm sure, but these are also the kind of words we use with immense frequency. That's also part of the reason these word classes (prepositions too, for instance) tend to be more restrictive about new entries compared to nouns, verbs etc. where an individual member of the class might not come up all that often (say, kangaroo). And I don't want to suggest everything language does or the way it's evolved is necessarily ideal, just that when you look at it from a systemic perspective, there always tends to be a reason for what's going on with it. EDIT: Although, I guess your point was it not being more taxing than calling up somebody's name, and I'm talking about something else. I'm silly.

Definitely didn't want to suggest that I wouldn't honor somebody's wishes, glob forbid, or that I'm flummoxed by the existence singular they, just that I have some concerns about how practical the very varied neologisms of the radical queer groups I hang out with would be outside of personal conversation. I get that this is a histrionic complaint to make, but it's also not ideal that the bespoke pronoun situation depends slightly on not too many people in your life asking for one. I don't want to look like I'm parroting language conservationism here, I'm all for neutral pronouns and more pronouns in general, I'm just not sure at the moment that some of the suggestions I have heard about this aren't going against the point of having words that refer to humans and are universal and not specific, particularly when you pile these ideas on top of each other. That line definitely hasn't been reached yet, but I figure it exists.

For sure. MRA is something of a misnomer there, since those garbage golems so clearly don't give a damn about the rights or well-being of a lot of men - men of color, trans men, etc - and will gladly throw them under the bus to keep pummeling feminists... for pointing out how good they have it in life if feminists are their biggest problem.

Oh yeah, massive air quotes around both factual and feminist there. I'm all for talking about toxic masculinity, but people who think it shows that men are the real victims here and somehow manage to ignore the part they have in creating and maintaining that shit, or how they throw their toxicity at women, definitely shouldn't be the ones doing it.

I have weird feelings about this pronoun business. They might be gross on some level I don't recognize, so I also feel like pointing out in advance that obviously people should be in charge of their own identity and I don't want to get in the way of that Also my passing familiarity with linguistics makes me pretty keenly aware of how absurd the grumbling you sometimes encounter about this and that being "not a real word" is. New words are created all the time and for all sorts of reasons! If people use it and understand each other when they do, then what business have I complaining about it. At other times, however, I feel like some folk are asking for a pretty substantial reworking of language, which may be well-intentioned, but I'm not sure how feasible it is. This may sound as hysterical as the people who respond to being told that there's more than two genders with their concern that they'll have to learn a million words for a million different genders, but I actually encounter that desire to make pronouns an entirely individualistic, everybody-gets-their-own affair sometimes. Tegan makes the comparison to names above and how nobody has any complaints about learning a unique one for each new person they meet there, and there's a lot of truth in that, but also the entire point of this word class is to reduce the mental and communication workload by giving us a way to refer to people with shorthand for "person previously mentioned." For some reason a lot of languages created gender-specific variants for a concept as universal as "person," which really shows how deeply embedded this mess is in our culture. That definitely needs to be addressed with neutral forms and a larger variety of forms in general, I'm just not sure that the change should go as far as altering the basic goal of the word class of being the "easy way" of referring to somebody else. A lot of my complaint boils down to "seems like it would be a lot of work," and that probably means, given my trajectory so far, that it's an idea that I've just not fully embraced yet, but will be preaching myself soon. This is just something that makes me a little uncomfortable at the moment, because it's an area where I might cause somebody else grief without meaning to, and I'd generally like to avoid that. Like, I'm not that good with names, but as awkward as forgetting those can be, it doesn't tend to be read as denying somebody else their identity.

I can't say I'm terribly versed in that side of nerd culture, so the name Zak S didn't ring any bells. Although, after that recent post I've seen several people I follow on Twitter share bad experiences, and a short search leads me to these three sites, which I have no intention of getting into myself. I can understand not wanting to condemn somebody based on what you heard on the grapevine, since that could be abused by groups such as GG for social engineering, but I think it's also important to remember that asking for official proof can play into really shitty power dynamics. Often the people who are in a position to look into such allegations happen to be men who happen to have known the alleged harasser for a long time and happen to end up giving the matter no more attention than a curt "I couldn't imagine him doing that kind of thing, he's a good guy." She's one of those "factual feminists," who throws other women under the bus in order to win approval, and whose cushy opinions GG gladly accepts as truth because they don't contradict their hateful worldview and don't challenge their silly little heads too much. If you want reasons to be wary, here are plenty. Choice quote about the axe she has to grind with Anita Sarkeesian (because of course she does). So for some reason criticizing the legal system is irrelevant because "at least it exists," and pointing out the actual fact that women face rape much more frequently then men is stereotyping, while suggesting that all men are emotionally insecure timebombs is a fact. Logic!

It's always amazing how people who genuinely think talking about stuff online doesn't change anything never stop to consider how that applies to the words they are putting online right this second. Surely if tweeting about an issue is ineffective, then tweeting about how tweeting about it is ineffective must be double-ultra-mega-hyper ineffective to the max, and yet it's still always done with the smug air of "let me show you how it's done you silly."

There's definitely a lot of wisdom in not operating from the assumption people are available for or interested in talking to you. Else you might end up looking like the gooblegrump who once got mad at me for answering Their tweet a full eight hours late. Timezones exist! I happened to be asleep, very selfishly. The joke thing I am probably guilty of on occasion, but in my defense it can be hard to judge whether something you say will end up being funny to somebody else, and whether this is an appropriate time to take it one further and earn favs and retweets, or if it's played out already. Better to err on the side of caution than look like a jerkface, obviously, so I only really joke around with people I've known for a while, but I still frequently feel bad about it afterwards, particularly if we've had no sincere interaction in a while.

We recently finished our look back at 75 games from last year. I think it turned out pretty good, but you can definitely see my editing slip up a bit towards the end there. Didn't get much sleep that week.

Apparently the "silent majority" he is getting together consists of just about 2000 people. Every time they do this kind of big posing to demonstrate their significance it ends up falling flat on its nose and they still haven't managed to figure out why. It's adorable, and gross, as always. In other news I have learned today that TB has a forum account on the Escapist and it's every bit as bad as you'd imagine.

I mean, it wasn't even his name in this case though, the guy honestly seems to have time to keep tabs on that and games he's involved in for the purpose of yelling at people. Funny how quickly these characters turn to trying to tell on people for made up injustices. Really makes it obvious how they never evolved beyond playground bully levels of social skills.

It's also worth noting that Randi Harper (of GGautoblocker fame) pointed out that even though Levine says he is just "telling you what the cops told me," it directly contradicts everything police told her while she was working with them. Not publicizing means less thrill for the perpetrators perhaps, but like all "Don't feed the trolls!" advice it also ends up working in their favor since the idea that you must stay silent about this isolates their targets and makes them bottle up all that shit inside them since externalizing any of it is seen as a victory for your harassers. Harmful stuff. I don't think anybody is really suggesting that Levine is being hostile or deliberately wrongheaded about any of this, just that he's the latest in a series of people not really affected by any of this giving unqualified and unhelpful advice. It's not the intention that I mind, in other words, it's the all too familiar thoughtlessness of yet another guy butting in with false equivalences about both sides being wrong and platitudes about being nice to each other.

There is this at least.