Deadpan

Truly, if only there was a movement that challenged conventional notions of masculinity and examined gender roles critically. In this hypothetical scenario, we might even devote a 235 page discussion to it.

Perhaps, but it seems pointless to muse about what people's innate stance on such issues is. Like all the gaters claiming that sites condemning harassment are on their side, because they too are against harassment (supposedly, when they feel like it, and even though they never actually call out harassment).

How challenging the boss rush is, for me at least, fluctuates wildly depending on whether I went fast because I got good items and wrecked bosses, or simply wasn't given a lot of room to explore. Since it's all in a single room, temporary buffs like Devil cards are pretty useful for that, and Dark Bum basically breaks the entire fight because of how many hearts tend to be dropped there.

Wait, has Sterling actually taken up some of their ethics talk then? His constant talk of consumers, consumer rights and consumer advocacy (bow to the infallible consumer!) probably inspired more than a few of those self-righteous douchelords, but he also tends to to condemn that kind of thing. Although, he's certainly tight with a lot of unpleasant folk for somebody who likes to claim feminist cred.

Hey Matt. If you're not already following them, then Forest Ambassador and Warp Door are good places to ge your small indie game fix.

That's a good place to recognize somebody from

This seems like the most fitting place around here to talk about what's been happening in my little corner of the world. The WKR ball (renamed to Academic's ball in a PR move) is a yearly gathering of Europe's far right hosted in Vienna. The head of our own right-wing populist party, Strache, is a regular attendee, and folk like France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherland's Geert Wilders have previously used the opportunity to connect with other protofascist figureheads and mingle with the more openly racist among their followers (the connections to various unsavory people and publications, think our local Stormfront, are manifold and well documented) under the guise of a fraternity meetup (which have a highly antisemitic history around here). Which is all very depressing, I suppose, but the point that sparks the protests is that, rather than meeting in some damp cellar somewhere, these people are given access to the most prestigious and stately location available, the Hofburg, former residence of Austrian royalty. I talk about this in part because of how frequently folk around here suggest to just not give these people any attention: while it's true that they really get a kick out of feeling like victims (Strache last year referred to attendees as "the new jews" in terms of being persecuted and this year talked about "the SA marching in the streets," later clarifying that he meant that to stand for Socialist Antifascists, of course), they also really don't mind being left alone so they can continue setting fire to asylum seeker's residences or something. It's also pretty gross to see how much of the coverage and political punditry revolves around the supposedly bad light the (peaceful) protests cast on our country. For the sake of appearances, I guess a lot of people would sooner stop talking about a problem than just fix the problem. Like, it's not the many people in the streets giving the rest of the world the idea that we're hosting a Nazi ball, it's the fact that we're hosting a goddam Nazi ball. So, to spite those concerned, upstanding citizens, let it be known to you fine folk that Vienna is full of racist fucks. And yet, at the same time, it has a very strong antifascist tradition and community. It was quite heartening to see how many people were out protesting yesterday.

To be honest I have yet to learn exactly how Weird Twitter is different from weird Twitter. The only times I have seen people elaborate on the idea was when they launched into weird conspiracy theories. Yeah, I may not have expressed that very well, I just wanted to note that it seems cynical for Chait and others to go "We're all liberals here!" (in spite of these differences) as a way to potentially shield themselves from criticism.

I found this article in my timeline yesterday and perhaps the central idea of there not being any room to grow if people are expected to be perfect from the get go speaks to some of the issues that were brought up here. Although I did find it a little dismissive of the "200 people who write the entire Cool Kid Progressive Media" and I'm always a little wary of mentions of Weird Twitter because of the other contexts it tends to come up in. I always find something to gripe about, eh? Although I have no particularly insightful remarks to make about this, I also wanted to note how foreign a lot of this debate feels to me, probably because a lot of the arguments about sides and driving people away seem to be informed by thinking in a two-party framework. I suppose I'm having trouble relating to the idea that if people feel alienated by "the left" then, even though they still share it's values, they'll end up swining all the way to the other side somehow. Which doesn't even begin to cover the argument on whether or not there even is a coherent left. As tberton already talked about, a lot of this seems to be neo-liberalists telling other socially progressive folk to stop squibbling and think of "the cause," whatever that may be, even though a lot of these other people probably lean closer to socialist views. So it certainly looks a bit snide to be told to play nice in service of a shared goal that likely doesn't even exist.

There's value for sure in nudging somebody along like that and walking them through the entire argument by allowing them to go through the same progression you once did, but that's also something that's only really feasible for friends and other people in your life, not exactly how it can or will work out in the wider public debate or stuff like social media interaction. It's already pretty strange how frequently people expect to be offered their own personal Feminism 101 when they approach somebody who, realistically, has better things to do than rehash stuff they already said at the schedule of a stranger. A customized, didactically sound, multi-week introduction is a bit unrealistic, although it is a nice goal for how to approach bringing up these subjects in personal relationships.

That tendency certainly exists, although as you say, people are getting rightfully worked up and I think it's important not to entirely deny people that anger. However, I think where it becomes a problem isn't that people don't know much about the subject, but that they approach it without any desire to learn or even the concession that it may be something they aren't an expert in. I mean, this is an area in which, particularly of late, every dudebro game reviewer felt like going "Allow me to add my uninformed opinion to the discussion!" And that's great, in a sense, because it's something that does affect each and every one of us! But also a lot of it is about personal experience that privileged folk may simply have no analogous reference material for. Also also, besides everything else, it's also an area with a long history of debates, work done in feminist studies, gender studies, etc. You certainly shouldn't have to know all of that to participate, but it's kind of weird that people very rarely acknowledge the expertise of folk like feminist scholars, critical gender theorists, etc. instead of pretending that they're arguing on equal footing. As the passage Chris quoted says, experience with something doesn't automatically cause critical reflection and consideration of the same thing, but when you have neither of those to show maybe you should acknowledge that in your approach.

Do you ever feel bad about arguments on the offchance that you made somebody else feel bad? Because that happens to me a lot. Anyway, I wanted to say that I think you're all lovely people and I hope I didn't come off as flippant earlier. Or end up doing so later. This is much better than Chait's piece for sure. I think Mangela already pointed out how weird it is to feel something is sexist/racist/whatever opposite a woman or person of color who thinks it's just fine. It's a complicated subject I guess. Obviously internalized sexism and racism exist, but also I think the goal of these progressive causes should generally be to empower marginalized folk and not to "save" them (the idea of handing down liberty contains some weird notions about natural power relations, see also Chait's point about American liberalism "extending" certain freedoms to people rather than admitting that they fought for those themselves, claimed them for themselves). So it's also not ideal to go like "Hush, child, don't you know how oppressed you are?" At least it's something that I always try to avoid in these conversations, if only because there's never a reason to not simply point them towards somebody who both experienced and critically analyzed the thing in question. In general, I think people's worries about where we'll end up at if Social Justice gets its will misunderstand that people (in my experience) often push for such things not because they want to establish them as a new norm, but in order to challenge the old one or draw awareness to something, give the misplaced dial a nudge towards centering it. But then people look only at the direction it's moving and flip out like "You want to take us all the way over there!?" For instance, I share his view that a fully customized gender pronoun system would be wholly impractical for publications and should be saved for personal relations, but also I'm not exactly sure that's why Smith asked for it, and not simply to draw attention to the fact that genderqueer or nonbinary folk routinely get sorted into one category or the other unless they present in a suitably unreadable fashion. I'm not entirely familiar with the case though, of course.

I mostly learned about the dropping feature because my right trigger has the annoying tendency to freak out and make me drop stuff even when it's not pushed. Very handy outside of that though, for getting rid of trinkets, or carrying cards into a particular room if you want to duplicate them.

Not link, compare. Perhaps it doesn't hold up quite well, but I also don't think it's fair to suggest (as far as I'm aware, before this has even been implemented anywhere) that the only thing it will achieve is allow people to skip stuff they don't want to read. Which, at least around here, also happens when it's officially verboten. And that's definitely not ideal, but I'm also not sure why you think stuff not being read is such a huge or new deal in that case. Education in particular is an area where you can lead the horse to water, but you can't force it to drink and you can't force it to make the most of the incredible opportunity its been given. Like, tests and exams don't dig that deep, and profound impact is something that's really hard to measure. They certainly can't always I guess, but this is such a profoundly personal thing that I'm not sure we shouldn't just acknowledge that the individual themself will know best when they're ready, how they want to confront that kind of material. Either way it seems pretty blase to assume they wouldn't have any interest in doing so. EDIT Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about it. It's worth noting, perhaps, that I'm talking about a different academic system as well, one where the lack of tuition fees tends to bring in more half-committed people than folk from across the pond might be used to, but in essence I feel like if people are unwilling to learn, grow and confront something challenging then they aren't going to do so either way and if people are willing and ready then they won't suddenly become lazy sods because there's an opportunity to.

I don't know, every time I see that conversation happen it seems to bring with it the suggestion that less than 100% effectiveness is a good enough reason to not bother at all and that people need to be confronted with challenging material, which runs a little too close to the "adversity builds character" bullcrap that's used to justify bullying sometimes, for me anyway. Like, I doubt people are not going to have enough challenging stuff in their lives if we don't throw it at them? Maybe the tool isn't perfect, I really wouldn't know, being one of the uninformed and fortunate people who have perfectly no experience with the need for that kind of warning. However, the concern that is expressed for what's going to become of society if we provide that kind of tool makes me uncomfortable since it almost universally seems to come from a place of assuming that people can't/won't make the right choices for themselves if we let them. "People are just going to roll up in a ball and hide from the world if we encourage them" strikes me as awfully close to "people are never going to get a job if we encourage their laziness by providing basic support" at least.

Ohhhhh my glob, I made the colossal mistake of looking at what a certain GG shitpile site had to say about the closing of one of their "enemies." First off: BARF. BAAAAAAARF. Secondly: All other unimaginably vile things aside, what the fuck is with the constant assertion that "alienating your core audience" isn't a "valid business model," as if sites were actually trying to monetize gamer tears*? Ads are a business model you cretins, and you are using the same one. I guess none of them would know the first thing about editorial policy though. *(would that I could)

It can be hard to present hard evidence for that kind of thing since a lot of it is in the nebulous (but still relevant) domain of feeling welcome or not feeling welcome. There are definitely times though, I think, when the bottled-up people anger people (understandably!) carry around goes off and can hit the wrong person, or be be disproportionately harsher than the crime. For example, here's a joke between Alan Williamson and Leigh Alexander (who know each other) that led Courtney Stanton to tear into Alan for, in her perception, being some random dude being creepy towards her friend. Leigh eventually told her to lay off, although that was not recorded, nor did she quiet down before folk like Christine Love took sidelong glances at what she was tweeting about and agreed that wow, dude's being creepy. As I said before, this conversation was also generally happening around this time last year, so there's a lot of nuanced writeups if you want to go back in time a bit (the Critical Distance weekly writeups should have good links for it, I think). Here's what Mattie Brice had to say, for example, opposite something Jeff Kunzler wrote about Ben Kuchera being picked up by Polygon. In general, Kunzler is a pretty good example, I think, of someone who's tone is irreedemably toxic: he writes massive rants about current events in the games industry that always seem to be more about him blowing off steam than doing the subject justice or providing any sort of nuanced critique. Last year was around the time even people with similar viewpoints had to tell him that so many chained expletives weren't helping the matter.

I definitely think of it in similar terms. That can become problematic when the argument is entirely treated as a spectactor sport in which to score meaningless zinger points, but it's also feels very unfair to say feminist arguments are ineffective because they didn't manage to turn around that one colossal bigot on the spot. By bringing it up at all, probably a lot of people got to see a problem they might not have known of before. For instance, this is how I came in contact with feminism. So at the very least it feels weird on that personal level for people to ask what calling people out on stuff has ever achieved.

This is all very predictably horrible, of course and I hope it turns out well for your boyfriend. In general, it's been pretty weird for me to take sidelong glances at those kind of industry discussions because of how far off people's understanding of the business is from the reality of it. I get pretty riled up about it since I made site for the explicit purpose of getting people started in a way that's honest to them about how precarious it all is, so to see these dungwads whip each other in a frenzy with this constant barrage of lies and bullshit about publisher money, or trust funds, or Patreon cash is very gross to observe.

I feel like there's a vibe of "yeah this is an issue, but this isn't doing it justice" going on here so it doesn't feel to me at least like anybody is being unfair to the article. There's something to be said, of course, for the pragmatics of working towards common goals regardless of other political disputes, but on the other hand that kind of surface level agreement isn't necessarily indicative of there being enough common ground to work with. In other words, it's possible to come to the same general conclusion about a thing for wildly different reasons, so how people got there is highly relevant. For instance, it's possible for a certain policy to be opposed by both men's rights activists and feminists. The former might do so because of its supposed misandry, the latter because it's ineffectual at achieving anything meaningful or works from a trans-exclusionary model of gender, etc. etc. So just because somebody wrote a misinformed rant about something that also happens to be a genuine problem doesn't mean they suddenly have a point.

I get what you are saying, in essence, about item effects, which you see as a predetermined factor in the game, vs stuff you see as the result of your actions, but it rubs up against my understanding of the game, as somebody who has learned all the stuff you complain about having to learn, in really weird ways. Like, you're saying you're fine with bosses because those can be overcome with skill, but at the same time item effects that can also be overcome with skill are some sort of weird injustice? I also don't feel like you're how few items have this kind of potential downside instead of just maybe being benign (for instance nothing bosses drop really changes how your tears work so those are generally safe to pick up, if it helps. A speed upgrade isn't really going to do you much good but it's hardly an instant-kill door) or that picking up items isn't technically a necessity. We all do it because it makes the game easier, generally, but if you're so worried about running into an item you don't like, you could just go the hard route and play through the game with base stats. It's possible, and you don't seem to have a problem with fair challenges, so why not play the game that way I guess? Or why not look up what items do in a fraction of the time required to have this long argument? I don't get it, personally. Although, I am pretty into roguelikes, so there's that.

To be honest, the knowledge/skill distinction you are making is supremely weird to me. Seems to fall right into that hole of things that people like to think are just about talent, and craft or hard work shouldn't factor into it. So a game that you could waltz right through if you happened to have godlike skill is fair but one that you could waltz right through if you looked at a wiki for a bit to speed up the learning process is unfair? I guess that's not really how I feel about it. I mean, one is an entirely hypothetical consolation for somebody as moderately talented as myself. The other is a very real option.

This is all also very strongly hinged on your perception that when you pick up something you don't like you are stuck with it, even though the game really fosters a pragmatic attitude towards how discardable individual runs are in the grand scheme of things. Realistically, even if you decide to take your lumps you probably won't be stuck with the thing you hate for more than half an hour at worst (which is to say best). And there's always the option to restart. And with unknown items, you still might get lucky and get something you like. I think it's a bit weird how you're mixing levels in those analogies like running into some sort of jinxed pickup is a given, but in bossfights aaaaanything might happen.

I guess that means it's down to finding a battery in the chest and kablooie!

Do we not have a general thread for taking about dating yet? Sounds like somebody should make that or revive that. Also, yay yous! Do cool things!