Nachimir

If you're referring to the video, that's Rob Cantor (the author of the song) doing the reading, and it's posted to his youtube channel. If you're referring to all of his previous plagiarism, then fair enough. I find Lebeouf funny enough that I basically hope there's a sealed letter predating all of it, stating some kind of plan or self-aware intent, but have a horrible suspicion he just got caught and is trying to spin it as best he can.

I got into a similar conversation, beginning with a friend posting a news story about the snapchat privacy breach with a caption something like "Reminder, if you use 4chan you are scum who tacitly supports this"; the first comments were people saying "How dare you call us scum freedom of speech" quickly degenerating into "OMG censorship it's not practical for Reddit or 4chan to keep child porn and doxxing out" and then, no exaggeration, actually went to "You might as well ban roads because people use them for crimes, and all pornography too just in case it's children", but it took a really sudden personal turn when they started to talk about how much the original poster had hurt them, they thought they were friends, etc.

Milo wrote an incredibly dumb and laughable piece today: https://archive.today/LuHMK As a friend said: Definitely real life executives and not a face drawn on his left hand. Or, "I'm a professional journalist and can't reveal my sources, but I can drop incredibly heavy handed hints narrowing them down to a really quite small group of people".

It's a very good swear indeed. Easily the best compound one I've read in years.

Chris Kluwe is good at bile: https://medium.com/the-cauldron/why-gamergaters-piss-me-the-f-off-a7e4c7f6d8a6

I very much agree with you on the above; it (and all extremist groups) intersect with some important issues relating to inclusion and alienation. I think gater is very much a personal choice for now (but can see the arguments against othering), but wouldn't be viable as a non-bullying term if they started to smart from it the way they do other words. If we could get to and support excluded people before this kind of movement did, it would eliminate much of the base of support they can go to. It's a very difficult problem though: The kind of people who are followed by the same social problems regardless of which group of people they're with often don't recognise how much those problems emerge from them and their own thought patterns, rather than being the fault of everyone else. Bullying/cliquish/exclusionary antecedents are victimisation, but set up thought patterns that can keep people feeling excluded, angry and desocialised long after those groups have dissolved and moved on. It takes a lot of support over a long period to help someone work through that. I think a lot of people aren't capable of giving that, most workplaces unfortunately aren't places it's likely to happen, and I've not known many social groups who'd manage it well either. Finding ways to solve it and resocialise the excluded would make a massive difference though, because GG, MRA, PUA and assorted other ideological movements basically function by hoovering up young men who feel abused and denied.

Naming something doesn't inherently dehumanise. There's a distinction between that and hurling neologisms based around "nerd", as far as I've seen "gater" isn't a part of what GG has picked up to define bullying, which is significant given their hypersensitivity about bullying*; and discussion involving the term doesn't tend to be hysterical, paranoid or savage. Early on the discussion went through a few insulting terms, mainly misogynerd, and a lot of people used them in anger and felt uncomfortable with it. I think people settled on gater because it managed to escape bullying language and a lot of unflattering connotations. * Edit: It struck me during my commute that this is a really poor choice of words that could be seen to condone bullying. I meant their tendency to construe almost anything negative as bullying, and that doing this is a significant part of their social identity.

It's become especially culty since mainstream media outlets turned on it. Short of persuading high profile figures like TotalBiscuit, I think the ablation that's inflicted on it might be as good as it gets. There's enough out there now that few people will be suckered into following it unless they're already paranoid types. A few things strike me as much more important in the wake of it: Recognising the core hate group who will now be moving on to find another way to foment harassment of feminists (In case you missed it, really informative storify linked by Merus earlier). This is a group who've been doing this for much longer than GibberGhast has been around, and will continue to harass women, trans people, feminists and allies out of anything they can. Recognise how GG sucked in the downtrodden. Being a white guy is not automatically a ticket to social acceptance, and a lot of GeezerGerms power was in its appeal to bullied and excluded kids/young adults. Reasoning some of them out of the position they're now in is going to be a fucked up and difficult job, if it's possible. There have been things I found it impossible to not laugh at, but near the very beginning Pippin Barr responded to the term "misogynerd' spreading and said that it's important not to adopt the language of bullies. He was right, and the entrenching that's happened around that language since is really fucked up (to be really clear: I'm not conflating bullying language with that bunch of articles about the gamer social identity, as GG did).

(For those of you who are interested in the ramifications of matter transmission, Rogue Moon is a really good book you should go read while the rest of us change the subject). Good news: this year the GameCity Festival has its own building and more staff. Things are getting done earlier, everyone is considerably less stressed/exhausted than usual, and nearly all of the people we're dealing with are really super lovely. Most games events I've been to or worked on in the past few months go some way to restoring my faith in people, but especially this one.

Well guns are just a super way to keep everyone in a crowded space safe.

No game developer unions in the UK, and there's often been a feeling that IGDA bestow a but of funding on new chapters, but after that they're on their own and developers tend to feel their money is just being funnelled to the US. There are many, many more meetups than there used to be, many of them full of developers who are between AAA jobs. I think those might have potential to form a union that could spread into the bigger studios.

Sucks Secretasianman I'm lucky to currently be working with a client who really cares about this kind of stuff and occasionally checks in to make sure I'm getting rest as well as evenings and weekends. Most clients are indifferent to it though, and I've occasionally had nightmare ones who ask for free extra days like there's nothing wrong with doing that.

Good pic, N1njaSquirrel

I think showing support and solidarity to those who are likely to be harassed is important. I was silent for a week or so in the hope GG would go away, but it won't on that basis, and silence just makes the targets of harassment feel less supported and more vulnerable. Today, the FUCKING DAILY MAIL ran story about #glittergrape in which they very bluntly positioned it as a harassment campaign targeting women in the games industry. GGs response was to accuse the DM of being "SJW controlled media".

My bad, I was half asleep when I typed that post, Elizabeth was simply retweeting them. What I'm wondering is when so many sites seem to be trying to stay silent on GG, what tips an editor over the edge of "Fuck this abuse, and fuck the consequences if we lose some audience, we're covering this now".

Following this one, Elizabeth Simmins spent quite a while tweeting at Stephen Totlio yesterday: https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520982456171003904 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520982582012686336 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520982727680876544 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520982906375000064 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520982996372164608 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520983111841349632 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520983232184324097 https://twitter.com/vivian_games/status/520983373431701504 At which point does an editor think "Fuck it?" on this? When someone puts an argument like this to them? When they realise how small GG actually seems to be and suddenly fear less for their ad revenues? When they realise they're way less at risk than the women who are being targeted?

I needed to blow off some steam.

The bit where he claims having an Indian character voiced by an Indian actor is equivalent to blackface: wow :0

And on that subject: http://cathodedebris.tumblr.com/post/99675407383/so-just-how-popular-is-gamergate-how-many-of-them-can A bunch of different things seem to be pegging it at around ten-thousand total supporters.

I'm seeing the same as Dewar, a lot of people who've disengaged. A few developers I know took that stance from the beginning, purely because they saw that as the quickest way of defusing it. Unfortunately, silence from the industry has left the more vulnerable people in it feeling threatened and lacking confidence of any support from their peers. Outside of silence, the closest thing I'm seeing to an effective counter at the moment is the attempt to show GG's support as small. The thunderclap seems pretty humiliating for gaters in that respect.

I've only blocked 34 gaters, and now, whenever I tweet the Official term for #GibberGland, I only get one or two responses at most. It seems to have died down a lot as more people ignore it… or they recognise my avatar

(Argh. Mington, I'd advise moving all of your domains away from 123-reg. Their owner, webfusion, is dodgy as fuck and will "mysteriously reset" to auto-renew any domains you set to lapse, which they give you a ridiculously narrow window to do. They committed paypal fraud after I cancelled my billing agreement with them (loads more cases like this if you google, including one where they somehow tracked down a business partner and took the money from their paypal account), paypal immediately ruled in my favour and refunded the money, and their response to that is to lock the account, along with all domains still attached to it, and post a notification about an "unlocking fee" exactly equal to whatever amount they stole in the first place. I knew how they'd behave so planned for it and didn't lose any money or domains I wanted, but from the bottom of my heart, fuck them and their shitty company. LCN.com have been really good since I transferred the domains to them). (Edit: Actually, that was strategychocolate.biz. The first year I tried to cancel it, I assumed I'd forgotten when I actually hadn't. The second year I realised something was up, so did some googling about 123, transferred my other domains and chased it with paypal). Sorry for the hijack Tegs.

I'd recommend against Squarespace too. An old employer used to use it, and not only are you locked in, it can get expensive fast. IIRC, loads of gotchas in the vein of "Oh, you want to do [thing]? That'll just be an extra five bucks a month then! Per site".

I heard 8 was terrible and 8.1 seems fine, once you've changed that setting that makes it boot to desktop instead of panels. I only use it as a launcher for games though.