Nachimir

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Posts posted by Nachimir

  1. Posted

    This stuff keeps seeming like it's winding down, then there's some new burst of terribleness; a little explosion of putrid shit. I find it draining to witness, and I'm not even getting involved in any real way (to my discredit). I can't imagine having to put up with this kind of nonsense (though not always so high-profile) for a large portion of my life.

     

    This is very much an orchestrated thing. I saw people not mentioning the IGF specifically, but mentioning that "something big" was going to happen on Sunday, also relating it to the person who did all of the digging to spawn that shitheap.

  3. Posted

    Nobody pronounces Leigh "lei". Like, nobody at all.

     

    To be fair, not only does no one seem to pronounce it like that, she does answer when it's pronounced "Lee".

     

    Holy shit, I think I'm done even so much as mildly prodding the GG tag or people who support it.

     

    Earlier this morning I saw someone claiming a dev doxxed someone for being transgender. I asked for information about what happened, and it came to light over the course of the conversation that no dev did any doxxing, nor was the doxxing a matter of someone being trans (that was revealed as part of the doxxing I guess)

     

    They seem to be more a bunch of wingnuts by the day. Jenni Goodchild (of Nineworlds) has been doing an amazing job of patiently engaging over the past few days.

     

    The IGF has problems (it's got a bias towards easily graspable mechanics coupled with unusual art styles), but that's mostly because these days there are a lot more indie games than the IGF can reasonably judge

     

    This is a problem that affects all festivals and curation processes at the moment, I think. It certainly does affect my work, and I've seen that exact bias in my own selections (especially as they're selected to thrive on a showfloor).

     

    I think A MAZE are the only people I've seen really buck this and show a really challenging set of games, but they've developed the kind of mostly-but-not-entirely-developer audience required for that kind of lineup to go well.

  5. Posted

    Anita Sarkeesian was doxxed and her home address was posted publicly. They claim to have found it so they can report her to the IRS because they claim she's non-profit federally but for-profit in her state, or some shit like that. But in reality, GG/4Chan just continue to be scum either way.

     

    It amazes me how they ignore their own actual, bona-fide crimes while talking about the law.

  7. Posted

    Done. I've seen a few people complaining about the amount of whitespace, but their current layout it works really well for posting images. Mobile, apparently, really sucks right now.

  8. Posted

    I think it just lets you follow people but effectively divide them between two receptacles. Nobody you follow gets to know which they're in.

     

    It certainly has a long way to go, but I think it's a promising start just because of where they're coming from.

  12. Posted

    The only way I can see to shut them up is to just stop going on Twitter.

     

    The hardcore gaters will never be swayed, but they'll look more and more unhinged as time passes and the wider audience they've gathered will ablate.

     

    You can lock your twitter account, meaning only people already following you can see your posts, and any new followers have to request permission to follow. Quite a few people I know did over these past few weeks.

  16. Posted

    PMed you both invite codes. If they don't work, you might need to reply to me with your email addresses.

     

    People to follow: You can probably take a look at my list for people who interest you once in. There aren't many people I know on there yet, but this person is posting incredible screenshots this afternoon:

    https://ello.co/cabbibo

  17. Posted

    In several discussions last week, a few developers I know voiced their disgust at how badly Twitter handles abuse, and started talking about alternatives (Twitter only accept reports of harassment from the subject of the harassment, but cap reports, making it impossible for someone in a situation like Zoe Quinn's to defend themselves).

     

    A few of us are trying this:

    http://ello.co

     

    I have ten invites if anyone wants one. It's funded by arts money with the intent of not following startup/social media business models. It might be another Google+, it might fizzle pathetically, but they have a pretty good statement of why and how they're building it.

     

    At the moment the normal model of web enterprise development is to make it and then hope it gets big enough that you can stick advertising on it. But we don’t want to do that. Our initial development has been funded by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. Public money, in other words. But we don’t want to (and can’t!) rely on that.

     

    Payments – whether subscription, upfront, or micro-, are limiting and kill the roots of culture (i.e. all the people doing great DIY stuff who could never afford to pay for our service). So, here’s the deal – we’re anti advertising, can’t continually publicly fund it, and we don’t want to put a price tag on this service. You will always be able to access it for free.

     

    We don’t know whether it will all work yet. But we also don’t think any other way is sufficiently proven either.

     

  18. Posted

    Yeah. I think they, and lots of other people who resorted to blocktogether, didn't really think the implications through. Blocking could be very different for someone who does versus someone who doesn't hire writers. Within minutes, it was also being referred to as a "blacklist" among gaters.

     

    At least maladjusted stupidity in games audiences has a name now: gaters. People flailed around a bit at first trying to find one that described them without prejudice, and the whole event has been big and traumatic enough they can just be named after their own thing.

  19. Posted

    (Edit: Yes, Jon is correct. I also saw a few people point at blocktogether days earlier, but after checking it out felt it was a bad idea for exactly the reason Polygon were caught out).

     

    Oh god dammit, Chris Grant, not Chris Plante. It was a combined list, and there was furious backpedalling:

    https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508740905860599808

    https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508758526735286272

     

    Grants response to industry figures being on the list was "look over there!"

    https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/508725940781060096

  20. Posted

    http://laurie-penny.com/why-were-winning-social-justice-warriors-and-the-new-culture-war/

     

    This is a culture war. The right side is winning, at great cost. At great personal costs to people like Anita Sarkeesian, Leigh Alexander, Zoe Quinn and even Jennifer Lawrence, and countless others who are on the frontlines of creating new worlds for women, for girls, for everyone who believes that stories matter and there are too many still untold. We are winning. We are winning because we are more resourceful, more compassionate, more culturally aware. We’re winning because we know what it’s like to fight through adversity, through shame and pain and constant reminders of our own worthlessness, and come up punching. We know we’re winning because the terrified rage of a million mouthbreathing manchild misogynists is thick as nerve gas in the air right now.

  21. Posted

    At first, they all avoided it because actual god damn journalistic ethics steered them well away from posting about a woman's private life. As it's rolled on and become a bigger thing that gradually switches targets though, and given how badly Kotaku and then Polygon screwed it up*, I've not really been surprised at how gingerly the specialist press have approached it.

     

    * Chris Plante Grant shared 1700-strong block list last night with a "block all" button at the top. As well as gaters it had a bunch of minority game developers and games journalists on it too.

  22. Posted

    I'm starting to have an automatic response to anything related to gaters now, which is just "get the fuck out of my head fuck off fuck off". I don't think I can watch any longer without internalising and mistakenly generalising a deep suspicion and hatred for a particular audience.

     

    (I think typing the stuff below has helped exorcise some of it. This really bothers me; a few events I work on have given me a sense of having to fight a scumbag, sexist, harassing element of the audience among developers and gamers alike. To see that element living, breathing and mobilising on Twitter has been dispiriting at best).

     

    I've seen various people accuse them of being a cult. They're not, there's too much diversity of thought, but a few groupthink terms have definitely taken hold in the weird little subculture driving this thing. Edit: Sorry, lots of bits added).

     

     

    Patterns I've seen amongst gaters:

    They impatiently wait for "the next happening" "the happenings" "latest happenings" etc. Most of the people investigating are just shuffling the same conspiracy gifs and youtube videos around without making many edits, few of them seem to do or discuss research. They may be doing that on a private channel, and after someone repeatedly vandalised their etherpad, they've certainly learned to keep backups away from that service. In the places I've been, they do not speak about hacking, though I and others I know have been subject to hack attempts since this started.

     

    Gater speculation on wrongdoing means that, to gaters, a person is automatically guilty. Gaters/gater allies committing actual crimes to obtain data on which to speculate is never spoken of as a crime; it's implicitly assumed that it will be admissible in court and the people who obtained it won't be prosecuted.

     

    Anything posted by them as evidence is seen as incontrovertible.

     
    Any actual evidence that's not in favour of their movement is "out of context", "cherry picking", or immediately claimed to be fake.
     

    Gaters have a continuously moving target. Now they're trying to give the IGF a kicking, if someone points out their campaign was apparently about press ethics, they basically reply "Yeah but this came up now and it's bigger".

     

    Anyone filing a police report over harassment is accused of not actually filing a police report (because of course "they faked it"). Most seem to think filing an FOIA request for documentation of an ongoing police investigation is fair play and won't be flagged in any way (This assumption in particular makes me think of them as flawed systems thinkers. It reminds me of how broken and biased toward the player game systems tend to be. The guards will forget you. You can always succeed. Means definitely justify the ends, etc.).

     
    Anyone who is victimised is just "Playing the victim card".
     
    Habits like claiming harassment is faked are backed by, amongst other things, citing Occam's Razor (!).
     
    For as long as they can't dominate news cycles, they seek to dominate social platforms, and occasionally speak of their hopes to get on (for instance) the BBC or other major non-games press (A friend asked me on Twitter to explain gamergate to her yesterday, and within a minute had complete strangers popping up to tell her "GamerGate isn't misogynistic!").
     
    They're worse at investigating things than the specialist press they claim are corrupt, because gaters are more tribal than rational. They're rather trust an unhinged youtuber than, say, a much more extensive examination of the IGF that Rock Paper Shotgun did, because the youtuber is one of their own.

  25. Posted

    I felt utterly elated when I saw that stuff coming up on ZQ's feed earlier.

     

    I've already tweeted them myself and this one seems to have gotten a large audience.

     

    Thanks, excellent :tup:

     

    We've also learned that Twitter will stand by and do nothing while this harassment goes on. I think it's worth discussing, as an industry and community, establishing our own social network that's a lot less awful.

     

    That's been obvious to a lot of women for a while, though I guess this has especially underlined it for games people. The most profitable thing for Twitter is not to shut down abusers, but to make it feel like the abused can do just enough in reporting them that they then don't want to leave as a result of the abuse. When you can advertise to a hundred abusers versus one victim, well :( :( :(

     

    Edit: The volume of abuse someone like Zoë receives is also an edge case, though far from isolated, and the approach in any case is definitely startup logic rather than moral.

     

    I've started messing around with some alternatives. None of them quite have the functionality of Twitter, but Ello is quite promising (I'd send invites, but I only just got into it and don't have any to send).