James

WHO IS THAT WITHERED HUSK OF A MAN, BARELY CLINGING TO LIFE? (Nice to put a face to the voice, Pete.)

Is it me, or does he really over-aspirate his Ps an Bs in that video? You can find it elsewhere by searching for "Oculus Rift Very Official TV Spot".

I used to hear foxes barking all the time at my old house. It's a pretty weird sound.

I still only like a vanishingly small portion of the photos I take, and I probably don't take as many photos as I ought, but here's a relatively recent one that I'm fairly pleased with:

I've helpfully corrected a couple of accidental errors you made there.

Exactly. The only way I can make any sense of it is if they believe that STIs are so rampant among homosexual men that they would end up throwing out so much blood it wouldn't be worth it, but that's an absurd notion. EDIT: Or perhaps it's because the screening isn't 100% effective, and they want to avoid higher risk groups. A startlingly offensive policy, either way.

How about protesting outside the conventions? That's a way of being visible to the audience without financially contributing to or implicitly endorsing Penny Arcade itself. And it's action rather than non-action, which I imagine to send a stronger message. Or would that be overly confrontational? Would the nuances of the argument be lost? Is that more immediately off-putting to those unfamiliar with the issues than a panel description? Are people even allowed to protest outside conventions? Is the very prospect kind of embarrassing? I don't know; it seems like something people do in other fields, so why not in gaming? Then again, it's not something that necessarily garners clear results with any consistency. Are there any other courses of action beyond the simple attend/don't attend binary choice that we aren't considering? I'm not sure the majority would have much interest in these sorts of topics, unfortunately. Could one set up a booth very visibly drawing attention to the issue, or would that never be approved? With regards to a potential boycott, I think it would really need to be exhibitors to have any effect. Unsold tickets will get snapped up by a near-limitless supply of enthusiastic gamers, but if high-profile games are absent, that might get noticed. Of course, some people will claim it's a publicity stunt, like they did with Fullbright, but there really is no escaping cynicism on the Internet.

Two more examples of my obnoxious laughter: Do I sound that loud in-game, or is it just how I've recorded it? If the former, I definitely need to turn my microphone down.

Last night's game had some pretty excellent moments, including this: Sorry that all my INCREDIBLY RUDE fellow GTAers ignored your enquiry. You don't want to bother mucking around with the in-game phone; we organize everything through Steam and GfWL (the latter being purely for the purpose of sending game invitations, which is an unfortunate necessity). So the thing to do is add one or more of us on Steam and GfWL; some of our usernames can be found in this and that thread, respectively. Feel free to add me: I'm TheJamesM on both Steam and Xbox/GfWL.

I enjoy "Thug Notes". Except he appears to be Australian (albeit quite posh/theatrical/whatever).

I know it's a parody, but did you ever see Forklift Driver Klaus?: Taken completely free of context, I think those are among my favourite videos on YouTube.

If I remember correctly, the UK blood donation registration form said men who had had gay sex in the past six months or something weren't eligible to give blood. It quite a few years ago, so I may be misremembering, but I definitely thought it sounded dodgy. I wouldn't know whether it's changed since.

These things get added to the Steam calendar, right? I'm much more likely to see that.

GET TAE FUCK

a) "Here" doesn't appear to refer to anything. Forgetted you the link? I'm finding myself with less and less motivation to go to the trouble of processing the stuff I record, particularly after spending hours trying to work out what format to keep things in for the long term, and why when I encode it in whatever format I decided on nothing except VLC and YouTube will read it right. I get frustrated and bored so it ends up just eating masses of space. Also I don't like leaving my PC on for days on end to do all this then upload it then realize I did something wrong and do it all again. I may take a crack at rooting out some highlights later this week, perhaps. Anyway, my playlist NOTE HOW IT'S A LINK TOBLIX YOU FUCKER

I very rarely create anything, and when I do I take very special care to ensure that it's entirely pointless and in many cases quite annoying:

I should be aboot! Sorry I missed last time. I stupidly made other plans that involved being somewhere outside of my room. What an idiot.

I'm vaguely curious, but I'm so absurdly inexperienced I'd most likely immediately crash and burn. Still, perhaps it'd be a learning experience. How long do multiplayer games usually take? Are they played over multiple sessions? Is this likely to be a pan-timezone thing? If someone has to drop out, can they come back in later?

As an idiot layman, I'm both frustrated by and frightened of Nick's sudden impulsive outbursts (which are also undoubtedly hilarious), but I find myself a little at a loss as to the supposedly disastrous implications from time to time. In this instance, what would "rebuilding his Kingdom from the ground up" entail? Redistribution of power among the vassals? Free reign to reorganise (dead wood, new blood, getting in more skilled and loyal people and so on)? Would it have leas to a more stable or potent Ireland? Or something else? To the unexperienced eye (e.g. mine; presumably Nick's), actions that gain territory have obvious value, while things that don't (or only contribute to land acquisition in the long term) rapidly become abstract and hard to judge the value of. It looked like there was a window when they were willing to play the long game with those two heirs they'd set up in continental houses, provided they could continue to make more dramatic short-term plays while they waited for those opportunities to develop, but those heirs' unfortunate demises have probably soured them somewhat on making such longterm investments. Then again, perhaps not. As long as they can keep marrying kids off, they can wage war on Britain in the meantime.

Messages of a sexual nature started coming up in the chat, appearing, falsely, to have been sent by SuspectKitten. It didn't stop her posting, so it quickly became apparent that something was going on and she wasn't just being weird (she believed she'd been hacked but Scratch's post suggests otherwise), but it was very creepy and unnerving, even if there was no actual security risk.

I'm not convinced that simplicity entails relatability. The life of an ant is pretty simple, but the nature of that experience is completely alien to me. Space marines might have straight-forward motivations and methods of action, but those have basically nothing to do with my own. I'm sure my life shares much more in common with those of most women than it does with those two-dimensional characterizations. Space marines are easily understood, sure, but their experiences, such that they have, hardly resonate with my own. (By the above, I don't mean to disregard the numerous very important ways in which women's lives do differ from my own, and that some facets of female experience might be completely inaccessible to me.) Anyway, I'm not sure I have the energy to continue with where this discussion has ended up.

a) That doesn't seem a very nuanced approach. Most people don't fall at the end of a binary gender distinction, and even if they did, it seems horribly insular to restrict your interests to things that are like you. Shouldn't we all strive to know and understand each other a little better? Basically the entire history of video games caters to a (theoretical) male perspective. It's already very well represented. The (theoretical) female perspective is criminally under-represented in games. There's absolutely no risk of people of the traditional male perspective (sorry for the awkward turn of phrase, but I don't want to typecast) being excluded in aggregate, even if they are excluded from the occasional one-off experience. These are grains of sand being flung against a mountain. I hope for a future where most games aren't gender-aligned, where there's no obvious bias one way or the other, where everyone can find something familiar they can relate to and something unfamiliar they can learn from, but if there were to be a few games that appealed more to women then men, that's absolutely fine. It's a drop in the proverbial ocean. c) Are women really harder to relate to than giant burly space marines? Anyway, I'm glad you try, and hope you keep doing so.

Look, I can't account for every single individual in the human race in an argument; if you're going to demand that, there's barely social issue we can properly discuss at all. Negative and unhelpful attitudes towards women exist, sometimes in loud, obvious ways, and at other times in subtle, pervasive, insidious ways. They're the attitudes that lead little boys to aspire to being astronauts and whatever and little girls to aspire to be wives. It's not universal, but it's still very very present, and it's a problem. These messages continue through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood, often in subtler forms that are harder to identify. Even if you're right, and most people are free from these influences (I'd posit most people make gender associations to many roles: if you imagine a doctor, do you automatically imagine a man? I do.), it's still not the same. In the standard case, it's another voice contributing the chorus; in the reversal, it's a contrary voice speaking at odds with it. I'm not arguing that it's not also harmful, but the male damsel in distress is less of a problem because it doesn't exist within masses of other similarly-themed messages; it largely stands apart. Anyway, this isn't really the meat of the argument – it's not like I'm in favour of male damsels – I just think it's very dangerous to think that you can flip anything to do with gender (or race or any other "minority" issue) without severely altering its nature. The power balance doesn't get reversed along with it. Having a feeble and helpless man in a game doesn't create a whole history of subjugation of men and all the associated remnants. People look at it and say "that's funny" because it's absurd, because it's completely at odds with what the prototypical man is. Perhaps it would be better to learn to identify with female characters. Isn't that part of what's great about fiction? It gives us a window into another perspective. Besides, I hardly think token characters are very relatable to anyone. It's an empty gesture. It might make you feel more comfortable to have a man present, but it's not actually giving you greater access to the story, and it would probably be good to let go of that once in a while. And me too. We could all do with being put outside our comfort zones once in a while. That seems like a fairly smug way to present an argument. It's obviously not self-evident to me, else I'd agree with you, which I still don't. And since when did your desire for something dictate what a story "needs"? Do all stories need to appeal to all people? A lot of stories in current games probably appeal a great deal less to most women than most men (although I obviously can't speak in absolutes). Is it a failing for a story to speak primarily to women? Not that I think this one does – its themes seem universally accessible to me – but even if it did, that would be a small fraction of a counterbalance to the huge weight of material that appeals primarily to men.

Sure, but we learn from our environment and the messages we receive, and the general narrative is that men are more capable at things like heroic rescues, and in general have more agency over a situation. This is evident in assumptions people make all the time. You might not make those assumptions, but it is nevertheless significant whether a story is in line with these assumptions or running against them, and furthermore whether this story exists alone or among many others like it. That isn't to say that the reversal is automatically OK, but it can't have the same significance as the original when the context it exists in isn't symmetrical. Presumably you're not arguing that the situation as it stands is gender-neutral. Individually, perhaps not, but taken as an overwhelming trend this is sexist and does contribute to negative stereotypes; namely that women are passive and helpless, requiring men to rescue them, usually through displays of might. Taken as an overall phenomenon, it's harmful. That's not an argument. I still wholeheartedly disagree.

Firstly, the video explains why reversing the genders isn't equally problematic. The main problem isn't the pure mechanics of the damsel in distress storyline, it's how that trope fits into the wider context of attitudes regarding women, and also how often it's been repeated. Society doesn't assume that men are incapable and needy, so presenting a man as being in need of being rescued doesn't have the same implications, and the story of a man being rescued by a woman hasn't been repeated ad nauseum, so it's not culturally ingrained in the same way. Nevertheless, the storyline is less than ideal whichever way you cut it, which Sarkeesian acknowledges. Secondly, I can't really see why you think the proposed story requires a throw-away love interest. You yourself acknowledge that what you're asking for could be replaced by a dog; surely it can't contribute much to the story emotionally. The story already has strong motivation, tension and resolution. It has a prison escape, the protagonist becoming a warrior, the threat of corrupt forces taking control, and a heroic return. If not, perhaps the protagonist's birthplace could be in immediate peril or something. It really doesn't have to be some interchangeable love interest. Not every effort has to be motivated by a romance, particularly if that romance is just a premise rather than something that's actually explored in the story.