Apple Cider

See, the social media people use that I cannot even go near is Facebook. I had a Facebook once, never again. Horrible.

I dunno, I like Twitter quite a bit but I wish we'd all go back to Livejournal.

Forums absolutely enforce more agreement than Twitter, I've found. Honestly, if you really want to scale it up, a lot of things we ascribe to Twitter, yes, performative, but also would count as echo chambering, as many people have stated. I think certain terms get used more reductively than they used to, including echo chamber. I think it also underlies a belief that Twitter HAS to be a free-for-all on your time versus curation. Though admittedly, I do also hate some of the performative aspects myself, but it is what the service sort of constructs when you have to say things in 140 character bursts, even with threading. If you are one person saying something, unless it's part of a conversation, it's very easy to just say things into the void.

I think the major airing sessions would happen less frequently if spaces were more conducive to being able to talk about little stuff without people getting feathers ruffled about it. I've really, really not liked Brianna's personality or politics over the past year but it's really hard to say negative things about someone publicly without getting backlash about it, especially if someone is popular. Hence backchanneling, private discussions, generally just being polite and keeping your head down. Because not liking and significant disagreement tends to require accumulation of the former to justify the latter. I dislike a lot of people or dislike specific things they do, everything coming out about Wu is probably because it was really hard to feel like you could say something prior to this (which some people did). As for the echo chamber thing, my experiences on Twitter have not really been that, there's so many people with different viewpoints that have made my life more enriched/open, but none of them are bigots or assholes however. I'm decently sure some people DO use it as an echo chamber but that's not the sum total of what it can be used for. But then again, I really do strive for nuance and discussion and generally being critical of anything that I put forward.

I will say this much, my life improved when I stopped paying attention to gamergate stuff on Twitter. I do not RT stuff, I don't ever talk to shitheads, I generally just don't engage on any level whatsoever. I also don't make concessions about sexism in the gaming industry in general since that's honestly more problematic than gamergate, GG is just the angry mob. But my life has so many more things to focus on and work to do that doesn't involve that cesspool. But I also don't agree about ignoring stuff that people say publicly or that I need to personally calm down about stuff when I'm not really angry vs. frustrated or disappointed. This is the same sort of stuff I deal with over in the feminist activist circles of Twitter in general.

We've gotten better with guest format over time, our earlier episodes in the general format weren't as strong. And yeah, we try to tailor things to what guests want to talk about, so we also do a bit of research on guests. We also just invite our pals onto the show. Thank you for the review. Edit: Neither myself nor Tzufit had any idea that the "what are you playing" was a typical question.

I don't like Brianna Wu but I'm extremely hesitant to also buy that she engineering her own harassment, that pitting two women's reactions to harassment is a good idea, or that Twitter is somehow where all the drama lives because people have real personalities and lives on there and use it to socialize. The idea that it's a news feed only and people are mucking it up with being people means you should probably enable muting/blocking better, probably? It's one of the few places I get to interact with my friends and the gaming community has made that impossible over the last 6 months because of all of the harassment.

I need this over my desk, done in needlepoint or something.

I don't agree with her either. True personal fact: I used to really be into that stuff until I realized that white feminists have a huge amount of institutional power regarding a lot of men, particularly men of color and so that sort of stuff is no longer interesting to me.

moddy, please make sure you eat something and if you have any weird symptoms, go get yourself checked out if you can. Don't play around with a concussion!

yeah I don't drink tears, I use them in my moisturizer. Truthfully though, while it's fun for a laugh now and then, I tend to not go really deep into that ironic misandry because after a while, you realize it's not very radical praxis.

I don't begrudge her trying to make it in a harsh industry by sucking up to dudes but there's seriously way less shitty dudes to make pals with, I guess. I'm of the radical notion, and maybe it's because I don't have to make a living off the games industry, that shitty dudes need to be on an island, not part of a diplomatic mission. I'm not an ambassador to "treat women and other marginalized people like shit" town, I'm "you should already be doing that" but that's why I'm not a very nice feminist.

As someone who mentioned today that I was disappointed with Wu, trust me when it's coming from a place of long-standing issues. It's incredibly hard to approach or discuss things with people when they fuck up normally, especially when they start becoming an already-tormented figure. I hope it goes without saying that Wu doesn't deserve harassment and I believe she's a human being just like me, who is capable of fucking up and flawed, but she's consistently practising politics I have not agreed with and pulled some weird stuff with my podcast (which I should have addressed at the time, but I have an unfortunate problem with being steamrolled sometimes) which lead me to quietly mute and block her on Twitter anyways, long before Goobergate really got going. The thing is just that now, all of the little bits of things a lot of us have wanted to address for a while have built up and everyone is venting their spleen and all that. It's complicated, it's upsetting on literally all sides. I hate criticizing feminists, I hate criticizing women. And all of us have gotten lumped together, regardless of political alignments or radical beliefs because we were all under threat of GG despite none of us being monolithic. There's so many women I don't agree with, who I still believe are human beings, that I just ignore addressing because frankly, at the end of the day, not every battle needs to be fought. I did that angry shit part of my life a couple years ago, that's not my stance anymore. But if someone consistently hurts people, it's hard NOT to say something. But a lot of it still gets backchanneled because it's incredibly hard as a woman to assertively confront anyone, let alone someone who is massively popular and has a lot of support.

Aurini and his ex-friend cannot hope to compete with llamas breaking free and a fucking dress, sorry to say.

It's probably so the tale didn't end in a complete downer. It's why Return of the Jedi happened, but in Greek myth.

Greek mythology has a lot of misogyny. But I also don't really use "Pandora's box" as a phrase. I just can't imagine it using it as a positive, even as a mythology devotee.

I hate Dril mixups mostly because it takes someone really terribly unfunny and mashes it up with Dril, which at least attempts to be quirky and funny. The whole "they won't let me fuck the flag buddy" is directly reliant on the entire setup from the actual tweet. Now that I think about it, the "this whole think reeks of gender" tweet would work though.

I would love an undercut but it would have to be something I can cover up at work.

I have no memory of the AYAotD's pinball episode but I sure as hell will never eat any green soups after the fucking fear soup episode. Does anyone else remember that one? Restaurant uses a room in the back to extract some sort of pure essence of people's fear and then puts it into the soup so to ensure that everyone is like, addicted to how good it tastes? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0514409/ It contained a very young Neve Campbell as well.

That would work as a great tattoo, sans the school name.

Implying that Leigh is an alcoholic is untrue and frankly, incredibly crass.

I really envy you folks with short, clippable hair. My hair care in the shower alone takes like 20 minutes.

I am listening to back episodes of Idle Thumbs, from 1 going forward and I had a completely waste of time idea to report on news that episodes touch on and then give an updated scoop on how said game or console eventually sorted out, a billion years later. I guess I am mostly just fascinated about hearing old game news and KNOWING how it ENDS. Time travel is real, folks.

This really gets me despite not being a huge Star Trek fan.

Anyone excited to watch House of Cards S3 tomorrow? :3