Smart Jason

If anyone's interested, here is a full take on what happened during the Crash Bandicoot 2 run, which has apparently been omitted from history and resulted in the runner being banned from future GDQs and Twitch itself. Also includes the ninnying of commenters blaming the whole controversy on oversensitve SJWs.

So, I guess a couple of weeks ago there was a hashtag trend concerning my alma mater and a recently released dark comedic novel by a former student called Bennington Girls Are Easy. The author was apparently inspired by her own time at Bennington and her subsequent adjustment to New York after graduation. She seems to have gone to the college at roughly the same time as me, because it references at least one real life event (more on that later). Now, it's not clear to me that any of the current or former Bennington students who were reacting negatively on social media (or through the novel's Amazon reviews) were necessarily doing so based on the content of the book rather than the title, but obviously that's not something for me to judge, particularly when I was told as a college-bound eighteen year old by multiple people that I should look forward to going to Bennington due to its traditionally disproportionately female student body and how "free love" the campus is. I'm certainly willing to hear any argument that regardless of whatever context that book may or may not provide, such a title is an irresponsible message to direct at a group of young women. This cool thing ended up getting made, though, I guess, even though at first I wilted from it because it seemed like the school itself was just trying to get some viral marketing out of the publicity, and even still, I'm more into hearing about the stories of successful independent women than I am about the whole school spirit theme which has never been my jam. The biggest reason I thought this was worth talking about, though, is that more than one alumni on Twitter took the time to attend and live tweet an audience Q and A the author was giving at a release event for the book, and I took the time to Storify the most comprehensive account of this because it really made my stomach churn. As mentioned above, in the very first chapter, the book references an actual event from the college: the death of a student when she and a friend fell from a second story window while practicing in a dance studio. I'm really sensitive about invoking real details like this in works of fiction, and to do it with such frivolity and that you have a character ask with an author's preciousness "How can someone dance themselves to death?" is pretty fucking gross! (The Twitter user Storified above plainly asked her if she felt it was appropriate to use this incident in a "comedic" novel - as you can read, the author simply avoided the question.) That's not why this is in the Feminism thread, of course. While I recommend everyone check out Charlotte Silver's myriad thoughts on the art of writing, such as: "Solitude and sitting...this is why so many writers are alcoholics or otherwise destructive," "To me, tone, as a writer, is really important," and, concerning the book's controversial title, "It's a novel. None of it is meant to be taken that seriously," what's most important are the truly compelling reasons she had for choosing to write about young adult women: "I think the girls in this book are relentlessly unlikable, every one of them." "The girls in this book are pretty grasping and avaricious, right...but I hope it's entertaining." "These hothouse female environments...all girls school, boarding school, offices with too many women in them..." "This book needs some men in it, right?" Anyway, I guess this is one of those times I've been working on a post for so long it feels like I've lost the thread, and now I'm just piling on to the point of likely victim blaming someone for their own internalized misogyny. I just couldn't believe what a font of asininity I'd stumbled onto when I discovered this Twitter timeline earlier today and thought it was interesting enough to share.

I hate to say it, but that picture only makes me want a rookie Solid Snake prequel all the more.

It's funny how The Simpsons and Futurama college episodes gave me a genre appreciation for campy college comedies despite having never actually seen them. That's probably not that anomalous, I guess.

I quit XCOM: Enemy Within again. This most recent run brought me to 205 hours played with the game and its expansion, and in all that time I've only made it to the end once. That was on Normal Ironman, in the base game. The little bugs and unfairnesses of this game drive me up the damn wall with this game, for no reason more so than that I guess I'm just addicted to its core gameplay and can't help but perpetually reinstall it just to fail it on some bullshit yet again. This is the second time I hit the same stopping point on the Enemy Within expansion and it's the poorest design decision in the game, in my opinion. At a random point after the normal story mission of assaulting the alien base, your HQ gets invaded and you're forced to defend against several waves of maximum strength enemies with a handful of your soldiers which you don't choose. The problem being, of course, that if you play like a reasonable person these soldiers will be wearing their basic equipment and be using assault rifles which do, like, four hit points of damage per turn against enemies with ten times that. Again, I stress, this mission occurs at a random time, and you do not get to choose your party. If either of these things were changed, there would be no problem, but instead the only solution would be to keep your entire barracks outfitted with your best equipment (i.e., procure enough resources to have everyone in Titan Armor and Plasma Rifles) just in case! The first time I got as far as this mission I rage quit as soon as I failed. This most recent second attempt, I thought that I might finally have things in hand, as I'd only just noticed a new option to strip all non-active party members of equipment at the touch of a button had been added to the party select screen. I thought that somehow, this might give me an edge because I could therefore stop what I was previously doing - going through the Barracks menu after every mission and unequipping every soldier manually - assuring me that my most recently used and therefore active party would always be the ones who were combat-ready. As a matter of fact, this new option, specifically added with Enemy Within, in retrospect completely fucked me since the people I started the base defense mission with weren't even part of my active party anyway. If you bother searching for help or commiseration about this massive problem, all you get are apologists explaining why this is your own fault and that the mission makes sense due to the fucking lore. The lore of XCOM. Seeing that I was completely screwed, I tried to Ctrl+Alt+Del out of the game (since I always play on Ironman) and I guess, for the first time ever, I did so while the game was auto-saving, even though I was sure I did not see the icon - because every attempt I made to load my save thereafter resulted in the game crashing. So, I quit this stupid, shitty fucking game, again. And I can't wait for XCOM 2.

Getting back to the original topic, the Mario Kart 64 run might've been my favorite of what I've seen so far of the marathon. If anyone missed that, I recommend checking it out!

I don't think there's anything pedantic about it. Even if you don't want to get into the full history of the word, having people use it casually just perpetuates an implicit modern association between poor quality and black Americans/black American lifestyle. It's a word that people should immediately realize has gross connotations.

I caught that too. It was the only time I've been around at my computer so far this week but had the stream muted.

I loved Daniel's shirt! I was waiting for a close-up of it to take a screenshot of it but every time the camera got further in his knee blocked the "M'LADY."

Episode four spoilers:

From SecretAsianMan's link: Slept through this one. Anyone want to elaborate on what happened here? I saw you tweeting during the Silent Hill 2 stream, Danielle. During any event on Twitch with a wide audience, I just close the chat tab; doesn't matter if it's GDQ, a Nintendo Treehouse, whatever, the chat is going to gross and toxic. Having said that, I don't know if actual data will prove me wrong, but I feel like we're getting more women on the couch this year than ever before and way more female runners than ever before, between Silent Hill and the co-op Octodad run from earlier today. In my entire time watching GDQs, I think I can only recall two different female players from separate events in the past. (Note that SanGillepsie, the Silent Hill 2 runner, only stepped up because the original (male) runner couldn't make it.) But if this is true, great trend. Just have to continue hiding the Twitch chat. (I acknowlege that it is not fair that we live in a world in which this is the unspoken status quo.)

I finally went back to This War of Mine and completed a new game. I guess my "party," so to speak, wiped out within a day or two of the ending last time. This time I didn't play it as a strictly, whatever happens happens roguelike and save scummed when someone died and survived, although with about half of my people getting sad epilogues. I honestly don't see how it'd be possible to play the game as a pacifist without, at least, a catalogue of meta-knowledge. I consider that a problem with the design.

I think the standard answer is that it'll all be archived on YouTube, if not also individually highlighted on Twitch.

Troy Baker tweets a transphobic joke and quits Twitter over people "choosing to be offended" about it. GamerGate journalist Erik Kain, whom I obviously have a hate-crush on, thoughtfully opines: "If you can’t joke about a particular demographic, you’re basically saying that demographic isn’t equal. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty terrible."

Oh, and a random complaint. One of those times you can spot a headline and know exactly who wrote the article: "GOG Galaxy Is A Smart, Pro-Gamer Alternative To Steam" showed up on Forbes yesterday penned by pro-consumer, GamerGate-apologist Erik Kain, just to further drive home the relationship between GOG, TotalBiscuit (who participated in a number pro-GamerGate conversations with Kain last year), and Kain (who I used to be a fan of before he clarified his position as a toxic garbage human). I love how the headline specifically speaks to GamerGate by implying Steam is anti-gamer and obviously in the pocket of Big Leigh Alexander, but the article never actually explains what that means, except for GOG being DRM-free, which isn't new in Galaxy and has its own drawbacks, and calling Steam a monopoly, as though gamers would give a shit if that were even true.

A rebuttal to Why Are You So Angry came up in my recommendations while I was watching something totally unrelated so I stupidly clicked on it and it's literally watching it in real time, while vaping, saying nothing until a thought occurs to him. Why Are You So Sublimely Incompetent?

I'm pretty dumbfounded that you were the person to originally post that Kris Straub comic but now you seem so steadfastly convinced that there was no correlation between TotalBiscuit's Curator page and the actions of his fans, which is exactly what the comic is about. You accused me earlier of missing the point when I said he has other avenues for commenting on games because The Framerate Police is a unique service, but really I'd say that that's sort of context-blind. Like other people have pointed out - and like I tried to express by saying he was painting with the broadest brush - the curation page doesn't deal with any relevant factors which his other channels can. If people are actually interested in his opinions on a given game, they can check his Twitter, his YouTube videos, etc. There, there can ostensibly be much more detail, thought, and not a shotgun blast of titles which are objectively bad and therefore anti-consumer. This list is just a cynical attempt to expand his brand on Steam at best and an obliviously simple way to offer his demonstrably toxic followers a concise hit list at worst. There is no good reason for it to exist.

You're being pretty arbitrary and generous here. In his SoundCloud explanation and all he says with childish certainty that sixty is "objectively" better than thirty and that his position was a moderate one for even considering thirty FPS games worth a glance (and furthermore that he wasn't expressing an opinion, but stating the objective fact of their inferiority). He already has so many other outlets for commenting on games, it was super tone deaf to make a list which actually evoked policing in order to paint every game on it with the broadest brush possible regardless of any relative factor.

Biscuit's attempt at corralling his followers attempting to cry "Censorship!" and boycott after Guild of Dungeoneering removed the Framerate Police Curator tag from its store page. Ah, that unique brand of disingenuous obliviousness that comprises TotalBiscuit. Note that this is one of several such threads on the game's Steam forum. And the developer put his dumb Curator thing back on the store page too, in good faith, because thirty frames per second is objectively worse and people need to know!! Edit: Oops, he pulled back more than I'd originally given him credit for, as I feared I might have done.

So, TotalBiscuit has made a new Steam Curation page called The Framerate Police which exists only to compile a list of games which run at thirty FPS. Because he's TotalBiscuit and has (obviously completely innocuously) cultivated a following composed of entitled harassers, this is not being used to "educate consumers" or whatever it's meant to do, but to - surprise surprise - stoke a bunch of witch hunts on indie devs. Here's one that actually updated his game's store page in order to quell "threats." Apparently Bain responded to all this but it makes me physically ill to listen to him so I can only surmise what he says. ("Blah blah blah, sorry for helping make your game better, I eat shit.")

Just finished this. Found the ending crossed over into being too impenetrable for my tastes.

Snake Eater plays very much the same in terms of controls, but one thing I had to learn the hard way is that enemies are now much more perceptive to your footsteps (no high tech sneaking suit, natch), so to sneak up on them and hold them up MGS2 style or make use of the new advanced CQC, you have to use the d-pad to walk silently once you're in close proximity.

That's really funny, and a game jam based on, I don't know, reverse Google Translated synopses of existing games or something similar would be genuinely interesting, I think!

It's not completely a red herring because the coffee relates to And I thought it was consistent, but I'd defer to someone who watches all the videos in order like I'd like to at some point.

I saw this earlier today and I'm not sure that (aside from one translator's take) this is an update to the story rather than just someone else's opinion piece on it - one that didn't need to exist and only seems to dismiss major issues. I hadn't seen any article suggesting that the character is "converted" explicitly due to her sexuality being considered immoral, it was always understood that it was because it was a battle hindrance. Confirming that doesn't make this better, nor does the argument that it's not outright stated that she's a lesbian. Brian Ashcroft also brings up the unavoidable fact that the character's drugged without her knowledge and then just moves on, only admitting that's it, huh, peculiar, since drink spiking exists in Japan too. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, people who've paid closer attention, but the Kotaku article is strawmanning fierce if its argument is that people thought the drug itself was meant to cure homosexuality. From the first time I read about this, I had no trouble understanding that this magical tonic just reversed people's genders in the taker's perspective - which is used to help her behave herself around other women and narratively lead her toward a heterosexual relationship. Saying this isn't gay conversion because of such technicalities is like saying there's no violence in Fire Emblem because they use magic spells and those don't really exist.