Irishjohn

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Posts posted by Irishjohn

  1. Posted

    Come on. His latest videos have him wearing a cowboy hat. Indoors. Regardless of the "weird kid on the playground" factor, someone doing that while trying to pull off a gordon gekko is just funny.

     

    This is true. Also, he's not a fifteen year old figuring stuff out. He's a grown man.

     

    while i find everything he stands for and expresses truly repugnant i have to on some tiny level commend his living with the Sinister Magician aesthetic. 

     

    Someday YouTube will get a Sinister Magician that fights for good. It's just that today is not that day.

  2. Posted

    Here's the thing...

     

    I watched a YouTube video making fun of Aurini (the guy basically cracks up when he realizes there's always a skull in the shot, and left it in because, well, it's really funny) and I felt bad for the guy. I mean, he must have feelings, right? It's that weird, cringey, deja vu "I felt this bad in secondary school when I was really vulnerable and people laughed at me" vibe. He's putting himself out there, and this must suck.

     

    Now, of course, he's putting himself out there to say horrific things that could (and may very well have) incited people to do terrible things. Including sexual assault. So there's probably something wrong with me.

     

    Having said all that, he seems to have no self-awareness. At all.

  3. Posted

    Aurini is kind of sad to me because he also looks like the product of an deep seated identity crisis or great masculine overcompensation that drives him to seek solace in the fantasy of being a cradle fingered, not-trying-at-all alpha male.

    He's like the kid that wears a trenchcoat, eats alone at lunch and pretends he has special powers, except he's a grown ass man.

     

    His weird "to camera" mode is incredibly creepy, and I'm not sure he understands just how creepy it is. That's before he even starts saying awful things.

  4. Posted

    Wait, what? What did Denmark ever do?

    "Roosh couldn’t get laid in Denmark, that’s why he wrote Don’t Bang Denmark (in reality he just found the women to be ugly, sarcastic, and unpleasant)."

    From blog post above. This keeps coming up. I just... I didn't know who this Roosh person was two days ago and I want to go back. Not surprising at all of course that a dude who is convinced Anita Sarkeesian is a scam artist idolizes him.

  6. Posted

    It's ridiculous to me that, on top of an unbelievably brazen and ill deserved sense of injustice, people are making fun of Tim Schafer because the maths of his joke was wrong. Public speaking is not a simple thing, guys.

     

    These Sarkeesian Effect idiots are getting worse. Aurini posted Skype logs of their conversations in a bid to show that Owen acted in bad faith. ..... Okay.

     

    http://www.staresattheworld.com/2015/03/jordan-owens-reasons-splitting-thesarkeesianeffect-skype-logs/

     

    Incidentally, the people of Denmark are getting an absolute shoeing in this debate overall. In other news, I had no opinion (or awareness of) "Game" until now. I don't like it.

     

    The manner in which Aurini is utterly oblivious to what a terrible person he is, is just stunning.

  7. Posted

    Speaking of which, I glanced briefly at the Escapist thread about the matter and there's an entirely unsurprising consensus that no, public ridicule and people taking a stand against them is great, because now the world will see how poor and persecuted they really are and they will find new allies (also somebody said something about Schafer having insulted "thousands of minorities" and I prefer to think that they don't actually call people "a minority" but rather meant that it was insulting to every different ethnicity, creed, sexuality and gender identity imaginable).

     

    http://southpark.cc.com/clips/256710/not-my-waterpark

  8. Posted

    These guys... seriously... these guys. :mellow:

     

    I had never heard of this site until now. It's... awful. Just awful. Their "Mr. Brianna Wu" schtick (and linking to a picture of Miranda Kerr to humiliate her further) is pretty awful. Wow. I need to go and shower now.

     

     

    Those seem like valid reasons not to like Twitter. OTOH, it also feels worth noting that the underrepresented groups who use it tend to be more concerned about its failure to police abuse and harassment than its character limit. I think the former is a bug, whereas the latter is presented as a feature. GG's presence on Twitter is partly because it's taken a hard "just a platform" line on the conversation, but also because it's a place - in most cases, the only place - where people can be mobbed and harassed directly.

     

    Yeah, it's not 8chan or anything but that cop-out from Twitter has to go. I know they're making changes but it still seems rough. I agree completely with the validity of the service for people from underrepresented groups (just look at the numbers of mobile internet use, and phenomena such as "black twitter."

     

    The biggest thing, really, is the inability of wealthy teenage kids that are really into video games to understand that they're wealthy. This is a wider thing in the US. Apple talks about iPads in classrooms like it will fix everything (speaking as an educator, um, no) and ignores the fact that they're really very expensive. A lot of GGers probably think they had it tough because they're still rocking an Xbox 360. A lot of people could only dream of affording one, but some of those people can get on twitter through an affordable smartphone.

  9. Posted

    Re: Twitter as an echo chamber. The difference between friends and Twitter is that you're way more likely to have a nuanced conversation with a friend than with a relatively unknown acquaintance on Twitter. Twitter is really great for shooting off sound bytes that get faved and retweeted from all the right people, but would be just empty words if said in an actual conversation. Performative point scoring is the most annoying part of Twitter, mostly because it's so predictable. That's what I meant when I was brining up similar rhetorical devices. Everyone plays to their own crowd and gets the positive feedback they need to just continue playing to the crowd.

     

    I just want to pop back in to say that this is a great elaboration on my basic point. I wasn't trying to be dismissive, but I do feel that people massively overestimate Twitter's usefulness in presenting forums, platforms and avenues of interaction. Communication is complex enough in this medium right now, where we have room to expand our points. Twitter just doesn't scale well at all. It's incredibly easy to misread a tweet (as it is a forum post or an email, incidentally). Twitter is fantastic for many reasons, but its efficacy as a political tool or mode of communication is extremely limited. If we disagree, the chances you're going to convince me with 140 characters are slim, and multiple tweets (or worse, twitlongers) are just frustrating. So "activism" on twitter mostly becomes a case of letting the people you agree with know something happened that upset you, and encouraging them all to be really upset just as you are.

     

    Again, I am really not trying to trivialize positive experiences people here have had with twitter. However, it's very easy (especially for people in the video game world, whether as enthusiasts, creators, writers, what have you, who use twitter A LOT) to forget that a lot of people DON'T use twitter and don't much care for it or know much about it beyond newspapers and television citing it far too often.

     

    Anyway, to get back to (or a bit closer to) the point, we have a case where Brianna Wu has been horrifically abused by idiots on twitter and now recently she's being turned on by people upset with her political position on having coffee with a guy who is probably a bit of an idiot and then being defended by others and then... My use of the term "echo chamber" referred to the coexistence of lots of sectioned off discrete conversations that occasionally clash together, which is what I see happening. I mean, Christ... I really don't have an opinion about who Brianna Wu has coffee with, you know?

     

     

    Despite that, we seem to fall back on this sort of very American attitude of trying to attack the problem at some individual level. Like, here we are discussing this one woman, and what her actions mean, and whether they are right and wrong, and like it doesn't have anything to do with anything.

     

    So yeah. This. Though I will say that you shouldn't do the American thing and beat yourself up for being American. This attitude is common in many places. We should also get away from the left-right thing; apart from the fact that distinction is incredibly loaded in the US, it's more of an extremist jerk/people with strong opinions/open minded moderates/leave Irishjohn alone he wants his football and his cat videos spectrum.

  10. Posted

    There are a lot of people, men and women, who have weirdly, almost gleeful, used this GG nonsense to make themselves known. It's a pattern I've seen repeated with any major social flare-up. It makes me uncomfortable because while I agree that harassment is wrong and that GG is dumb, I don't agree with they way it gets discussed. There's an individualistic streak to it that feels wrong and honestly, kind of manipulative. In many ways, the GG rhetoric and the rhetoric of some of these vocal Leftists on Twitter are exactly the same and I should be able to say that without being labeled a sexist.

    I agree completely. I'll retweet interesting articles about China and other history nerd stuff, and occasionally link to a political article I like but Twitter is very limited when it comes to actual mature interactions, thus exacerbating these problems. It doesn't help that some seem so eager to rally around individuals, whether that's the odd number of Giantbomb users with a picture of Gerstmann or Shoemaker as their avatar on the GB site, people that consider Wu to have some kind of obligation to the rest of us, or people that think Mark Kern is not a shameless opportunist.

    It's a weird thing and it just emphasizes that Twitter can be an echo chamber that doesn't accomplish very much. And as for being rude to people, well, there's far too much childishness going around. Being right doesn't entitle you to grandstand or just be rude.

  11. Posted

    https://i.imgur.com/MWJ5rCe.png

    Like, I'll be the first to say that Brianna has said some ridiculous things (except you probably won't hear me saying that because I care more about the fact that she's constantly hounded than I do about my personal opinion about her public persona), but is it really so difficult to understand that class and wealth are not the only forms of privilege imaginable? To wit, it's pretty obvious to read that the pertinent forms of privilege she's referring to are not being a woman in tech, or a trans woman, or an outspoken feminist, or any of the many things Wu has been targeted for for months, which is prooooobably why Kern might fail to grasp that the "media spin" he's rallying against was maybe, possibly, sort of... accurate? But as always, people who don't understand concepts like privilege come at them in the same way they think social justice proponents do, which is to view privilege as a linear scale with no privilege at one end and ALL THE PRIVILEGE at the other, and in this case Kern wins the oppression olympics because he grew up with less money.

    3000 upvotes.

     

    It does seem ridiculous, but then again.... those tweets are completely out of context. Part of this is a wider issue with twitter use anyway, but I'm pretty sure taking out a couple of tweets and throwing in a Jackie Chan image doesn't constitute any kind of thoughtful analysis.

     

    The word "privilege" is thrown around far too much, and that comment seems (out of context) to be fairly immature and silly to say the least (even if Kern himself is from what evidence I've seen a bit of an idiot) but it isn't a bloody competition. 

     

    Going back to the point earlier in the thread, the whole thing here is that Brianna Wu should do and say what she wants to do and say. The only people arguing that "SJWs" like us slavishly support her every statement are GGers obsessed with her. Sorry for basically repeating the point, but in relation to that second image, just... ugh. So what if she said something ill considered or downright unpleasant? I guess that means we get the boobs back in our games. I don't know.

     

    I value this community. Thanks for being here y'all.

     

    I have been in and out over the last year and honestly, I missed this place quite a bit. Being part of a mature and interesting conversation about this rubbish is almost disorienting. Very pleasant.

  12. Posted

    It's also the GGers that are focused on the binary opposition dynamic to the point where they go on about "anti-GG" constantly as if it were a thing.

    I don't know much about Wu, but I agree that it's not productive to hold up certain figures as being key in some kind of clash, if only because it would legitimize a key GG point. As far as I can tell they round on people, those people respond and this is taken as a clear "anti" narrative.

  13. Posted

    I just realized how weird his body language is when he talks to actual people. Keeping your hand on your coffee looks super tense.

     

    I don't know, assuming for a moment I'm willing to accept your supposition that women are in fact people, the man's life could be at risk. She could be on the verge of physically attacking him and using his body for her needs.

     

    I wish this was just me being ridiculous, but I am now watching videos mocking this guy when I should be working and it is terrifying. I'm basically paraphrasing him.

  15. Posted

    This whole thing is hysterical. I wasn't familiar with these idiots at all until today. A quick look at their Patreon page and just.... wow.

     

    Their complete lack of self-awareness is bewildering. They hold up Anita Sarkeesian as this fraud for asking for a one-time payment of $6k and getting much more, then establish incredibly unrealistic "stretch" targets for donations per month. That's per month, ongoing. Bewildering. Absolutely bewildering.

     

    I also quite like their pretensions to intellectual superiority while repeatedly displaying a shallowness of critical thinking ability bordering on illiterate, let alone juvenile (see also: Total Biscuit). John Rawls invented social justice. He INVENTED it.

  19. Posted

    Ech, PC controls suck, really bad. They make this into an action game, but then don't even allow you to strafe at all with the controller. Switching over to the keyboard there's no way to turn on permanent mouse look, so unless you want to play holding the right button down the entire time, you don't get that either. Also, you can strafe, but you turn sideways when doing it making shields mostly useless. : (

     

    I'm finding the controls tough as well. I really hated DA2 and I suppose I thought this would be DA:O all over again, and it's... weird so far. I don't like it. Tactical view, with which I had buckets of fun first time around, doesn't feel right. I also want to move by right clicking more. Eh, just started the game, maybe I'm figuring out the kinks.

  20. Posted

    I'm encouraged by the mixed reviews actually. For one thing, it demands that people ignore the scores, for the most part, and actually read the review (though many may not). We're also getting to a point with games were different critics can have different opinions about a game, about what it's trying to do and about what it succeeds in doing. That's a very cool thing.

  21. Posted

    I don't know, I think maybe a dozen people can succeed like that, whereas a hundred thousand other people fail like that, and meanwhile the dozen tell everyone else how easy life is if you really want to succeed.

    This is cheesy, but it's a valid approach as long as you're open to your definition of success evolving as you get older. Working hard and doing your best won't necessarily mean you end up as chief creative at Blizzard or something, but hopefully you'll end up with a job that matters to you, you'll live in a place you like and be with someone you care about. But absolutely, to make out that people in high profile positions are there purely because they worked hard is inane. Luck, socio-economic and cultural lotteries all play a part.

    I know nothing about this guy. I stopped listening to Giantbomb forever ago and the majority of their written content now is poor. I was always waiting for them to shut up about energy drinks and talk about games.

  22. Posted

    Yeah, it is kind of brutal, like, the first hero I have for my all hero challenge is Windranger. Cool, that should be no problem. But then I look at the next hero I have: techies. Ugh... do I really want to put in the time to learn techies (the answer is no).

     

    See, I'm a beginner and will be one forever (I haven't had time to dedicate to a DOTA game in ten days) so I more or less have no choice but to be THAT guy, running around as Nature's Prophet doing nothing in particular.

  24. Posted

    My time for playing games has been dramatically curtailed this year. I still find time to play, but all notions of actually getting through my backlog are disappearing. It was futile anyway, but still... I loaded up the Game of Thrones RPG the other day with the idea that I would finally play through it only to realise that I bought the game at a time when the TV show's theme tune behind a game menu was enough to get me interested in playing a game and that the actual game itself just doesn't appeal to me all that much. It's a weird mix of "look, if you like the TV show you'll like this!" and a real game. That's being a little unfair really, especially as the whole reason I bought the game was for that TV show/books vibe. It's just not enough to carry it for me. Maybe I'll reinstall it midway through the next GOT season.