Nachimir

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Posts posted by Nachimir

  1. Posted

    OMG, early in that thread someone links to a AbledGamers Twitter discussion about jumping in CoD.  Some of the gamergaters thought that they were mad BECAUSE PEOPLE COULD JUMP.  And not because it was more difficulty to control and custom button mapping isn't supported.

     

    I saw the jumping discussion and it was sort of fabulous. Especially the way that, once corrected, one of them settled on "Ok well it's not as bad as I thought but it's still totally ridiculous". Way to misunderstand the cause you were championing mere hours ago. The thread carried on to try and eviscerate them as "not a real charity", try to poke holes in everything they do, and slag off some of the things they do as being "Just for PR purposes". While whining about how "anti-GG" is the enemy of disabled people now.

     

    This MIGHT be the most infuriating part about those whole...debate is such a generous word...this whole THING (I mean besides the rampant threats and ludicrous levels of denial) the notion that internet and gaming culture USED to be more inclusive.

     

    But it HAS to be framed this way, it's ALWAYS been framed this way. Nerds have always seen themselves as the place where the "outsider" can be welcomed, but that's a crock.

     

    Yeah, it's a current I've been aware of, and as a result I think one of the most productive long term interventions would be for games industry bodies to fund anti-bullying initiatives. A lot of gaters are beyond hope, but we could diminish any current of future supporters by offering good support to marginalised, bullied and desocialised people.

  2. Posted

    The charity saw the KiA thread and just ditched them pretty hard. They're mad.

     

    n9D0fl8.png

     

    I enjoyed/was astounded by this comparison of a charity wanking festival to hypothetical Nazi's curing all ills:

     

    'Sorry, there's no "gotcha" here.

    "We were going to be linked to an evil organization that harrasses women online and is evil and mean to people on the internet."
    This is the excuse they can use, and there's nothing we can do to stop them.'
     
    'That's not a good excuse.
    If the Nazis in South America, ISIS, and a resurrected Stalin came together and created a cure for all diseases, then offered it to people for free, no one would look at their Stage 4 Terminal cancer child, shrug, and say, "Fucking Nazis man" as the child died. They'd take the cure and probably think better of those groups for it.'

  3. Posted

    There's some truth to that, but yeah that's primarily a case of there not being enough representation generally so each portrayal bears an oversized burden of representation.

     

    What gets to me is that they take that, run with it, and end up at "Yeah, so stop complaining everyone, white dudes are just the best option!", and then detour into "Actually I wish people would stop victimising us white guys". It fascinates me that that person quoted gets to the idea of anyone exhibiting a minority characteristic being unfairly called upon to represent "their people", then closes it by ascribing that as an act of his ideological enemies rather than a widespread circumstance of the societies we live in.

     

    I'm finding it slightly fascinating to watch a divide with identity politics on both sides. Sure it's absolutely laughable to arrange such structures around an identity as constructed as "gamer" and that leads to all the ridiculousness I've quoted above, but the one hope it gives me is the prospect of anyone involved with identity politics examining their own beliefs more closely. As in, identity politics that are easy to pick apart might help to weed out and eliminate weak arguments and blind spots from other kinds.

     

    Edit: Gulfs kind of appear and disappear in GG too. There's an absurd string of comments discussing Terry Pratchett and Margaret Thatcher here.

  4. Posted

    Finally, a rationalisation for video game protagonists being white dudes:

     

    "In short, it's usually a white male because nobody cares what such a character does, how he is portrayed or treated or what happens to that character. For the most part.

    If it's no longer white or male, then it somehow gets treated as a representative of it's demographic which can lead to people looking for societal/cultural messages where there aren't any intended. Moral panic feces hitting the outrage fan increases several fold.
    Did I get that right?"

     

    So close to an epiphany!

     

    I've heard representing minorites fairly is even harder than animating women. It's also totally fine to offend people as long as you didn't intend to, because intent is a special form of magic.

     

    "[–]subtleshill

    More importantly, why are evil villains always white males?"

     

    Yeah. Why are they never robots, aliens, super-soldiers, genetic hybrids, ghosts, insects, cartoon animals, Russians or Muslims, eh? Don't sweat it though, I'm sure the writers didn't intend to offend you.

  5. Posted

    Second thing: Thread about "gaming once being a utopia"

     

    "I want to return to a time when anonymity in gaming and on the internet meant we could escape the prejudices of the real world and not be judged by our race or sex or class. […] Gaming has always been about escapism, an egalitarian utopia where your standing in the real world doesn't matter. I want to return to that."

     

    Yeah gaming has always been a egalitarian utopia, unless the other gamers found out you were black or had a chuff. Now you can barely throw around casual rape jokes without someone oppressing you.

     

    "This. This is all I want.

    I want our Utopia back. And I'm not going to stop fighting until we get it."
     
    I'm pretty sure you just have to fight your way around the next corner to get to utopia. Just burn down a few more people's lives and you'll definitely be really, really close.
     

    "Other than slurs shouted by vocal minority of trolls in gaming chats here and there there wasn't any problem at all. We've learned a long time ago that we need to ignore the troll if we want to keep a free internet. The other option is 1984 internet, it would be clean but also fucked u. In fact I'd just have been arrested for saying the utopic 1984 internet is fucked up so you can probably see the problem."

     

    I've heard the bandwidth on 1984 internet was really bad, and when a bunch of racial slurs came down the line it meant you could hardly ignore them at all. We have to just let harassment happen because otherwise really bad things would be happening to this guy in the dystopia he's imagining.

  6. Posted

    I kind of wish I'd been infiltrating KiA just so I could ask, all indignant, "What about gay porn? Where's the gay stream? Hey we're #notyourshield!"

     

    From what I read, the pornstar seems to have her own reasons for doing it, and they mentioned not being able to explicitly name it as a stream for gamergate. Also, in a simultaneously horriffic and hilarious way, someone assumed it would involve a woman dressing up as their mascot. Comments spoilered because, the horror:

     

    "Porn: VivianJames travels back in time to have sex with young sexy Gaben and Nintendo bosses, it is so gonna be epic."

     
    "Not a fan. Mercedes is just in this for the money, and Vivian James was explicitly made to be non sexualized. I get that this is just Rule 34 at work, but I'm still opposed to it."
     

    "Uh, no, a handful of anons were whining when Vivian James was made that she shouldn't be sexualized. This is not the same as "explicitly made to be non sexualized," especially as rule34 immediately followed."

     

    "SHUT UP we can do whatever filthy things we like to the fake gamer girl we invented. Stop being so wank-uh, I mean sex-negative. I can't get it up for charity when you're limiting my freedom of speech like this!"

  8. Posted

    I didn't realise Russia was in some financial trouble. What stuck out to me though was this quote:

     

    The rouble's slide has led to fury in the Duma, where populist politician Evgeny Fedorov has called for a criminal investigation of the central bank. Critics say the institution had been taken over by "feminist liberals" and is a tool of the International Monetary Fund.

  9. Posted

    So I got fired this week. Don't really want to get into the particulars, but suffice it to say that being fired sucks enough.

     

    Anyway, today was my 30th birthday. I generally hate birthdays and I think my mom was feeling bad for me, so she secretly paid off the bike I had on layaway. That was an amazing thing, but it made me feel guilty. But whatever, I should just appreciate it and not let my guilt get in the way of a good thing, right?

     

    Well, on the inaugural ride, I got hit by a car.

     

    Fuck today.

     

    Oh man. So sorry to hear all of that :(

     

    I hope you, and the bike, are okay.

  11. Posted

    Not very many games excited me this year, and I had a massive bias toward local multiplayer.

     

    My GOTY without a doubt was Towerfall Ascension; local multiplayer with a lot of discoverable systemic interactions at the same kind of level as Spelunky. I wasn't sure about the things added over the original at first, and some of them (e.g. bolt arrows) change the play a lot and take some getting used to, but it's just such a refined game. The design goes above and beyond that of most similar games. Me and friends screamed and laughed by far the most with this during 2014, and it often broke the ice with strangers at events too.

  12. Posted

    I reviewed a load of cameras for the latest issue of Singletrack. It's not online, but in issue 94 if you're interested in mountain bikes or action cameras, and you can see a scan of the page with my face looking stupid at that link.

  13. Posted

    Ooh, I read a few issues of Chew and always meant to go back to it. It seemed fun.

     

    I picked up the trade of The Wicked and The Divine recently, it's gorgeous.

     

    I always wait for trades now; singles take up loads of room and look ugly on shelves. I think the only things I've kept in that form are King City and The Tick, and I'm kind of scared to go back and read The Tick. I found it hilarious as a teenager, and wonder if it'd hold up now.

  15. Posted

    (Ooh, thanks Megaspel; useful link. I get sick of FB showing me the same post I'm not interested in for days at a time).

     

    I went out with friends tonight, and one of them is a builder who told me an excellent story about someone he's working with: He was paid to fit a bathroom for someone in a house they were renovating, and they agreed an amount in advance. On the last day of work, they customer tries to haggle and get a day for free. The builder says "You can go get me all of my fucking money right now, or I'll start ripping out the things I've installed". The guy goes and gets the money and drops it off, but when the builder counts it, it's five pounds short (an odd amount to be short, as most cashpoints and banks dispense in denominations of ten pounds, it's not an amount you're likely to mis-key, and five pound notes are a very different colour to other banknotes, so it was deliberate). His last job before leaving was to hang the bathroom door and fit a door handle, which he did… but he put the hinges on the top edge  :)

     

    Imagine trying to explain that to whoever you call in to fix it without saying "I tried to fuck over the last guy".

  16. Posted

    Argh, that Wes Anderson trailer that moddy posted is so poorly done! They misspelled "rebels!" They Futura Condensed for some reason!

     

    I found it particularly annoying that the first shot is so well set up to be edited as a Wes Anderson thing, and instead they put bad typography over the top.

  18. Posted

    A main concern I have with the game is how despite featuring a PoC (Person of Color) character and featuring issues surrounding PoC, it's still codified in the very gross narrative framing and politics Far Cry 3 presented explicitly, which in FC4 it's presented more insidiously due to the setting change. Also, note that I said "featuring issues", which is also a humongous problem AAA games have

    […]

    Finally, on this "featuring issues" thing, or rather "featuring X social issue/theme" thing so popular in AAA. To put it bluntly, it is nearly always obnoxiously ham-fisted, vapid social commentary and exploration of themes in something that in the end, isn't concerned with commenting, but serving you on things. An exemplar commercial, capitalist-as-fuck video game. It uses theme and issues not as things to explore, but as "content" to be consumed along with it's lavish systems. And you don't even have to play it to see this. All of this is presented in the forefront of all of that game's marketing. They take pride in saying and doing absolutely nothing, intent to feeding us the same bullshit. See: Bioshock Infinite as a perfect example of a game that does that and ends up shooting itself on the foot. Also, Far Cry 3.

     

    I think AAA writers often mistake referencing things for actually talking about things. I hate it; it's probably the worst tendril of games trying to do things better but actually doing worse. There was that developer who said something like "If you hate social justice you'll hate some of the things we've put in FC4", but everything I've seen has made me think "That's it? Just a bunch of nods at things?"

  21. Posted

    I'm on the list too, but that's no surprise as I've engaged with and detracted from GG quite a lot.

     

    I tried one last time the other day with an alt account, and the tone has definitely shifted. They're really obviously True Believers now, and think their cause is so righteous that it excuses abuse, or somehow means it's not actually abuse if they're the ones doing it.

     

    Several gaters piled on to me, kept jumping topics and avoiding giving any answers while continually demanding proof of anything I said. In response I posted four links in a row showing documented abuses and lies committed by GG, and it prompted them to suddenly switch to becoming incredibly verbally abusive, with several immediately resorting to copying the hashtag back in to try and instigate a pile on (not just an interpretation of their words; it was a specific exhortation from them). What really stood out to me was that, a few tweets before that, they'd been talking about "GG is against abuse".

     

    I'd concluded a while ago it was useless to engage, but that confirmed it for me. I saw these tweets this morning:

     

    Make a joke at their expense, they'll "be deeply wounded" and take it up with "your leaders" right away. Same with insults. Stray comments..

     
    Really this kind of is a much simpler point than I realized when I started typing. Do not, under any circumstances, talk to any GGer about..
     
    anything ever. The reasonable ones left, so it does more harm than good 10 times out of 10. Flat out, period, don't do it. Tell others what-
     
    they're saying, sure. Reports, directly pointing it out to their immediate or upcoming targets, absolutely. Don't engage'em though, please.

     

    and I hope I didn't make anything worse for anyone. What she says is spot on though: engagement from non-targets doesn't distract or sway them, it fuels them to go after their targets harder.

     

     

    Amusingly, this was an international survey, and there were plenty of international respondents, and yet the creator still made this graph:

    attachicon.gifimage-14.png

     

     

    Actually put my palm on my face.

  23. Posted

    Ouch! Glad you don't need metalwork at least, SpennyDubz. Six weeks off the bike though :( :( :(

     

    I went to a taster session for BMX racing last week, and had a lucky escape: learning to manual, overbalanced and flicked the back wheel forward over a lip by mistake instead of sucking it up. Luckily it was a fairly big one, so I could throw the bike and slide down the outslope. Wrist and knee have healed, but my heel's still bruised.