Nachimir

Cine, as I said on Twitter I really value your posts here.

http://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/101639865598/some-things-i-shouldve-said

Anyone else playing this? It's pretty good: overpowered planes with melee attacks and combo based scoring. I've hit a few walls, but messing about with different plane combos kind of helps you not get too frustrated, and eventually you hit on something. Parts of it felt impossible at first, but now I notice myself taking bigger risks and thinking "I can loop through those bullets and get another attack in" etc. At first it seems really difficult to keep your multiplier up, but then you learn attacking the small stuff will just diminish them until you've got nothing left to juggle. Eventually you learn ways of balancing your attacks between the smaller things and the bigger things to keep your multiplier up while taking down big enemies. I hit a wall around 15,000 points, then tried the Brutal Rauser, which is an insane DPS machine: So far, it's the only plane with which I can take out battleships, aces, and the blimp in a single game. Battleships: Aces: Blimp:

GG didn't seem to cast much of it's shadow at GameCity, apart from one guy who thought it'd be hilarious to continually reference it while playing in a live text adventure event. Which it wouldn't have been under normal circumstances, but especially not since Zoe Quinn and Leigh Alexander were two of the DMs writing in response to players We wrote/tweaked anti-harassment policies, and had these up in the venue: http://twitter.com/chromatogram/status/526411507132018688 It was a weird week. A bunch of people would sometimes tell GG jokes because that's a way of coping with it, and there were a few games of indie-illuminati themed werewolf too, which were generally hilarious. At times though, with some of the primary targets of harassment actually around, it was all way too close to the bone. I hope people joking about it doesn't cause them to forget the ongoing, long term harassment GG is a manifestation of, or think it's been defanged.

The first two are really excellent The second pair: My sympathy :|

At least it doesn't capitalise it anymore.

What's changed is the ability to publicise that information globally. I awoke to news that a friend of mine was doxxed last night. He already suffers from an anxiety disorder, and notifications from his phone now give him stabs of panic. He's doing okay. He's staying with friends; we got the police in and are doing whatever else we can for him.

Those are some pretty futuristic medieval typefaces.

(edited) (I actually became a convert to "video game" from "videogame" this year, because contracting other types of game, like board game, in type felt super weird. But that's what the NVA are calling themselves, and it is catchier. NVGA sounds like a stupid screen resolution or something). At least this name for video games never caught on.

It's reminiscent of the FOIA requests for police reports too: like they see themselves as able to poke at things, but never as a part of them. As if they see themselves as fundamentally external to any system they interact with.

Ah, yeah. Road positioning is pretty much the only thing you can do on top of that. This article on human vision by a fighter pilot is great reference, and since reading it I've tended to take a position nearer the centre of the road when approaching junctions. (Scotchlite silver reflective stuff is also awesome at night)

Enquiring minds want to know.

I find it goes like that. Are you riding the Curry Mile by any chance? Want me to give you some defensive riding lessons? Those cycle lines British councils paint at the side of roads aren't worth shit and also aren't obligatory. Ride fast, take the whole lane and no one will fuck with you.

Thr ee words.

Not directly my shit, though I've been working for them and am there doing production for the GameCity Festival this week: National Video game Arcade Since March, It has been enormously difficult to not speak those three words to anyone, and now I can shout them at the top of my lungs. GameCity moved into their very own building and, until the announcement last night, I spent the first half of the festival fielding questions like "How did you get permission to paint signs on the walls?" with answers like "Er, I dunno, it'll probably be fine". They have more than thirty thousand square feet of building and I've been making arcade machines and installations for the past few weeks. Including this, since we accidentally ended up with a load of cat vinyl and it needed sprucing up:

Oh fuck, missed this earlier. Glad you're okay, and I hope that it all resolves itself quickly.

Oh that's priceless Blambo Didn't realise! … I only half wish I'd written it about something else ¬¬

(Oh god, two more pages debating a bunch of knock knock jokes overnight? No thanks). That really stuck out to me too, they're weasel words. It's also obvious he hasn't dealt with cases like tis much before. He states that he thinks the harasser needs help, but has gone into quite a bit of detail over things he's done, then posted it in a highly public and visible place.

Season one feels like a pretty lame episodic serial until it crosses over with the second Captain America film and brings in more long term plots.

Hidden solely because it's related:

It's on every day until next Saturday I think this is a really important thing to think about. We can't collectively guarantee someones personal safety, but how can we support such public victims of harassment? I suspect in such public and specific cases, the best thing we can do is work towards having a better culture by calling out the bad and building more of the good. The owner of Page 45 told me fifteen years ago about the audience they sell comics to, and that they call it "the real mainstream". Their customers have a roughly 50/50 gender split, and age ranges from young kids all the way to elderly people. They did it by selling comics in a friendly, accessible way; forcefully making their shop avoid any of the exclusionary comic shop cliches like till cliques, making it look like a regular bookshop in terms of furniture, shoving all of the superhero stuff at the back, and filling the front two thirds of the shop with all of the interesting contemporary fiction, art books, zines etc. they saw comics retailing neglecting when they set up in the mid-90s. It's worked, and that it's been so evident for so long has always given me hope when games have seemed too puerile and regressive. We're closer to that real mainstream audience than you think, but many of the existing events and publications we have don't understand and won't contribute much to it. Gaters are surely doing damage in denying games excellent voices, but they've taken major blows to their credibility in the past week, and it seems like not one mainstream outlet has been fooled by them. There are ways we can fight back, even if it's rare that we can support their victims personally. There are events like GameCity, Wild Rumpus, Fantastic Arcade; organisations like Babycastles and Mount Royal Game Society; places like Bento Miso in Toronto. They're springing up worldwide and are mostly not on gaters radar because they're ability to target is necessarily as simplistic as how they build support, and there are too many of them already. While GG may succeed in burning down bits of the industry and tarnishing the image of gamers, there are many, many more people who care about building safe, inclusive spaces and are working very hard at it.

I advise taking a break from anything GG for a few days. I don't mean fuck GG by that, I mean "fuck that particular flavour of despair". I'm currently in the middle of working 20 hour days on a video games festival that's explicitly built around the ideas that games are for everyone and everyone can make games. It's full of kids. We made a spaceteam bridge that they're busy modifying and adding more shiny bits to. I'm currently building a room for Mountain with beanbags and a bunch of arcade buttons on the walls to trigger the musical notes. When I curate stuff at EGX that gets accused of not being a game, it looks a bit aggressive and confrontational. Here, it's the kind of thing the festival does and its audience, built over the past nine years, understand and enjoy that. By the end of the week we'll have had a who's who of GG boycott lists visiting and doing stuff, including Zoe Quinn and Leigh Alexander. Especially in light of recent months, we've had to prepare a lot, from making ties with local police to putting anti-harassment policies in place and training people, but here with the festival running no one is talking about GG, they're just getting involved in showing, playing and making stuff. These kids are not going to grow up thinking games are for boys, their parents are here and are seeing that games and developers are nothing like the vitriolic puke they've been reading about, and the festival directors are really fucking committed to making games more accessible. We all have moments of exposure to the worst in games audiences, ones that make us think "Oh shit, are we actually trapped with this bunch of people?" If you look at GG stuff all day you'll feel doomed, but we are not. Fuck all of Milo's bullshit about "senior executives who want to remain nameless"; I know festival directors, curators, collective organisers, developers and players from all over the world who are super fucking committed to making games inclusive. Developing a lunatic fringe is just a part of growing up, games will learn to dismiss it as it deserves. We counter it by starting other, much better things for other, much better people.

I can see the bits of cult thinking clearly enough; their evangelical Twitter talking points are very similar to the training I got to go door knocking with a bible when I was a kid. Persistent, repetitious, and spoken with absolute faith that leaves no cracks for reasoning to penetrate. The similarities with PUA culture were obvious in their chaospad chats months back, when people said stuff like "Jenn Frank fucking had it coming" and everyone just continued to discuss as if that was a reasonable thing to say.

8chan is the closest they have to that, and it unfortunately gives the same indications as 4chan.