Nachimir

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    4931

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Nachimir

  3. Posted

    I've had the thought more than once if some people online realize how easy it was to get contact info for the average person back in the day if they didn't explicitly have an unlisted number/address.  Obviously modern doxxing is still a bad thing, but we're only 20sih years removed from this being a standard communication tool that was literally in every single house in America, and the knowledge how to dial the operator and ask for any number in the country was relatively universal as well. 

     

    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.

  5. Posted

    (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.

     

    Softs. Softs!

     

    "Have you played any good softs recently?"

     

    "Hardcore softs"

     

    "This soft blew me away"

  6. Posted

    You're absolutely right. Also, Reddit and 8chan love to go on and on about the Streisand Effect that their critics are apparently invoking when they attack them, but I know I have found so many new, interesting, and different voices in the games industry due to the publicity that comes from attempts by #GamerGate to silence them. It makes me feel like they read the Wikipedia article but didn't stop to understand how it could apply equally to them.

     

    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.

  7. Posted

    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)

  9. Posted

    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.

  11. Posted

    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:

     

    854873134f.jpg

  12. Posted

    All that's happened to me recently is that I got hit by a car while cycling home from work. Bike's damaged, but the motorist is paying. My ankle's a bit fucked up, but I'm not the kind of person who would milk something and sue over an accident. Especially as I can still walk (just not run).

     

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

  13. Posted

    Oh that's priceless Blambo :)

     

    Oh, and thanks to Nach for making Life post #10000.

     

    Didn't realise!

     

    … I only half wish I'd written it about something else ¬¬

  14. Posted

    (Oh god, two more pages debating a bunch of knock knock jokes overnight? No thanks).

     

    Does anyone else find it extremely troubling that TotalBiscuit's (typically self-important) statement on Dodger contains the words "legitimate harassment"?

     

    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.

  16. Posted

    For a bunch of years, I had pretty loose and sticky bowel movements. Adding in a few spoonfuls of yogurt to my morning smoothie ended up giving me, according to SCIENCE!, more normal, firmer poops. Which meant having cleaner toilets and using less toilet paper.

    That's why I said maybe. I would say for a lot of people, the reason toilets clog is because of using too much toilet paper. If you've got some buildup in your drains or if the slope of the drain has changed over time due to a settling foundation, then clogs are more likely the more stuff you try to put down at once.  If clogs clear really easily, you're probably just getting clogged right there in the toilet joint.  If they are clogging on a regular basis and are much, much harder to clear, than that can indicate that your blockage is in the main drain somewhere after the toilet. 

    As far as clogging goes, our house isn't a very good measurement, as the plumbing is only ~5 years old. I replaced all the drains inside the house when I redid the bathrooms, and the only original plumbing left is the final 10 feet or so underground from the edge of the house to our septic tank.  So it's not old enough to have built up any residue or to have settled. 

     

    FWIW, I'm no expert on plumbing.  I just learned enough to redo the plumbing on my house and haven't done anything since. 

     

    Hidden solely because it's related:

     

    the best this ever got for me was when I drank a two litre bottle of water every day and had an apple every lunch

  17. Posted

    The third of your quotes here is just about the most depressing thing I've ever read. I don't understand how people get like this.

     

    I keep seeing people tweeting about Game City, and it makes me sad that I didn't go! Also thanks for writing this; it's optimistic and encouraging.

     

    It's on every day until next Saturday :)

     

    I keep thinking about Zoe Quinn's twitter and how obviously terrified she is, and I feel like I should be able to do something

     

     

    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.

  18. Posted

    I think you're discounting that this has happened before. We're recovering from the decision to market computers and computer games exclusively to boys, when in the 70s computer games were seen as an extension of D&D, which had a significant female audience. Infocom had little difficulty attracting a female audience, and many early computer game pioneers were women.

    What happened, by and large, is that women thought they were wrong to have liked games, that there was something wrong with them, and stopped.

    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.

  19. Posted

    I generally trust David Futrelle's nose for such things, and he seemed pretty convinced there wasn't much difference between Roosh and the culture that birthed Gamergate.

     

    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.

  20. Posted

    The one thought I did have though is that it would be kind of nice to have some kind of message board out there where gg'ers can clearly identify themselves as such (so there is no ambiguity as to what banner they fall under), state what it is they take issue with, and provide 3 specific examples that demonstrate that what they take issue with is actually a thing that is happening.

     

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

  21. Posted

    No, he still plagiarised someone else's writing and thought he'd get away with it

     

    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.

  22. Posted

    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.