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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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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.

The whole exchange feels like some weird Dadaist performance art.

-racist video removed-

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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.

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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.

 

He would be completely harmless if 0 people agreed with him.

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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. 

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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.

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Yo Blambo, maybe I'm just more tuned in to shitty 4chan anti-semitism but that Le Happy Aurini video is p anti-semitic.

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Yeah, I picked that out randomly and don't recognize the stereotypical orthodox Jew in the second half, I thought it was just some random video. My bad, removing it.

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A quote that showed up in my Twitter feed. From GamerGate, but I don't know where from specifically yet.

 

B_cIEu0VAAA39cp.jpg

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Guys, I finally found the perfect image to describe GG.

 

 

cOrWo58.png

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A quote that showed up in my Twitter feed. From GamerGate, but I don't know where from specifically yet.

 

B_cIEu0VAAA39cp.jpg

 

That might be from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2y30o2/gdcrant_this_years_gdc_wasdifferent/

 

Supposedly it's from some dev who went to GDC and was disappointed because it's "different" than it used to be (e.g. more people than usual dyed their hair, too many hipsters, people were hugging too much). I want to say "it's a weird post," but it's not that weird, I guess. Just more of the same kind of stuff that comes out of the Claptrap camp.

 

Also, Tegan, that's perfect, haha.

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Wait, wait, someone mentioned... PUAs? Do I dare Google that?

 

PS: We need a "Do I Dare Google That?" search fnction.

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Wait, wait, someone mentioned... PUAs? Do I dare Google that?

PS: We need a "Do I Dare Google That?" search fnction.

Pick Up Artist. Basically, people who think the key to getting laid is to follow this intricate system of rules, essentially treating basic social interaction as a puzzle to be solved.

If you've heard of "negging", that's one rather well known PUA technique.

EDIT: HAHAHA, phone autocorrected "negging" to "begging".

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Wait, wait, someone mentioned... PUAs? Do I dare Google that?

 

PS: We need a "Do I Dare Google That?" search fnction.

 

pickup_artist.png

 

except that last part never ever happens

 

(sorry for the giant post)

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I think one thing that the conversation about the Owen Aurini mess illustrates beautifully is how those kinds of views are both sad and infuriating at the same time, because they on the one hand managed to work out that something is going fundamentally wrong with their lives and society at large through the genuine pain that generally leads people down that road, and on the other hand they're drawing entirely the wrong conclusions from that pain.

 

Conventional notions of masculinity still very much revolve around making lots of money and buying toys with which to impress women, for instance, and while this has always been impossible to achieve for most people, the current economic unrest means that it's also becoming impossible for more and more men of privilige, who now emerge from that particular wreck blinking and confused. But instead of realizing that idealizing competition and excess was always setting them up for hurt, they blame feminists for spoiling the game. Instead of realizing that the script they've been given is toxic and contradictory, they are befuddled by its ineffectiveness, praise PUAs for providing an alternative, and then turn on those false prophets for lying to them when it doesn't work out. They cry about the oh so terrible struggle of failing to seduce women, but don't stop to consider what it means for them to be reduced to a measure of masculinity.

 

People have already brought up Roosh's near breakdown, and that was pretty much an identity crisis waiting to happen, teetering right on the edge of realizing that all the effort he puts into grooming and seducing women doesn't fill the void in his life, except then he fell right back into the hole of blaming women for "forcing" him to brush his teeth and wipe his butt instead of examining why a life of superficiality leaves him unsatisfied. So like a lot of these people, this leaves him both a sad and a loathsome man. Sad because of the real pain he pins on imaginary sources, and loathsome because his attempts at bandaging up that wound consist mainly of hurting and objectifying women.

 

Oh, in actual GG news, even though I'm not a fan of "factual feminist" and recent Escapist hire Lianna Kerzner, I appreciate that even she manages to see through a lot of GG bullshit and calls them out on it, apparently, in this stream (link goes to a storify summarizing it). The result has been for the other goofs on there to later release another video where they say they've lost all respect for her and condemn her for spreading "lies" even though they're unable to disprove even one of her arguments.

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Man, even reading that Storify is painful. I used to find the inanity of GG amusing, but nowadays it's so ridiculously tiresome and ultimately (IMO) unimportant. Is GG even really a thing? It really just strikes me as a handful of shitty people who used to identify with a hashtag but now disagree on certain things that nobody really cares about. I'm not more inclined to like Owen, Aurini, Roosh, Liana, TB, or anyone else more than anyone else in that group regardless of the minute reasons why they think they're more reasonable than each other.

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As an organized unorganized group, they are completely irrelevant in terms of actual numbers, as they are more than eager to demonstrate whenever they attempt any show of size, like how the "millions" of people supposedly upset over Schafer's sock joke managed to collectively raise a whopping 500 bucks for charity. However, as a symptom of wider trends that fostered and normalized these attitudes and behaviors, as well as still active source of pain and harassment, they remain relevant, I think.

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That might be from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2y30o2/gdcrant_this_years_gdc_wasdifferent/

 

Supposedly it's from some dev who went to GDC and was disappointed because it's "different" than it used to be (e.g. more people than usual dyed their hair, too many hipsters, people were hugging too much). I want to say "it's a weird post," but it's not that weird, I guess. Just more of the same kind of stuff that comes out of the Claptrap camp.

 

This is such a confused collection of garbage. The way he complains about the new wave of indie devs and 'hipsters' makes him sound like he's a) Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, and b ) Someone who's been in the industry since the early '90s and basically hasn't matured since then. But he opens by saying he's been in games for 'a few years', a vague statement that I'm reading to mean 4 years at most. 4 years is not a long time to work in games if you're claiming to know how the industry works, and what's best for it. And he talks about the rise in prominence of indie developers like it isn't something that's been happening since 2008. And at fucking GDC, the home of the Independent Games Festival. It's bizarre.

 

This section of his rant is pretty telling:

Remember back in the day when we had to write our own engines or use actual game development libraries in C++, C, C#, etc.? Remember a few years ago when we had Torque, XNA, SDL, Cocos2D, or just straight raw OpenGL and GLUT? You have people making games in Flash now or GML making millions of dollars. It's a good and a bad thing. Easier to make games and make something fun and amazing in less time? Great! I don't have to put in any effort to make garbage and say I'm a game developer? Fuck off. I'm not knocking Game Maker, HTML, Flash, or Unity developers, but I can say the bottom line is it's certainly attracted quite a lot of riff raff.

Recalling the time Idle Thumbs discussed

, Chris said, "Imagine if [it was easy to develop for the PS3].
". And here's someone saying as much unironically! He's in the TotalBiscuit school of 'if it wasn't a fiddly ballache to make, it's not a real game', with this weird elitism about crunching (A practice that is genuinely harmful to developers) that is pretty typical of someone who's only worked in games for a few years and doesn't think he'll ever burn out (I've been there myself).

 

There's a lot of weird cognitive dissonance too. He's a minority who recognises that he works in a predominantly white field, and then talks about the inclusion of diversity panels at GDC like it's a bad thing. The whole dyed-hair screed is just weird, culminating with '...they were always artists, at the top of their field, and they earned that right to dress and look however the hell they wanted to, and I respected them for it'. What the fuck is he even saying with this? He mocks the idea of indies carrying out 'literal physical hugboxing', but ends by expressing gratitude for people agreeing with him, creating his own 'hugbox' (This term is garbage). And he took a shit in a bathroom and was amused that the staff had to deal with it?

 

Also this:

In the meantime let's all make some cool shit and hopefully discourage the SJWs via skill.

Hilarious.

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The hug part of the rant is just fucking weird.  Like, physical touch with another human that is platonically intimate is...bad?  Hugs are fucking badass, and anyone who expresses disdain or concern about the presence of hugs is weird. 

 

Edited to add: GG loves to bring up bizarre interpretations of toxic masculinity, but then be (naturally) completely blind to how it appears in the real world.  A resistance to physical touch like a hug is something that I heavily associate with trying to maintain this facade of ridiculous traditional American masculinity. 

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I once accidentally kneed (well, more like thigh'd) a guy in the balls because the thing to do at my school to avoid pee-pees touching when hugging a dude was to angle our crotches. But I went in too deep. TOO DEEP!!!

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That might be from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2y30o2/gdcrant_this_years_gdc_wasdifferent/

 

Supposedly it's from some dev who went to GDC and was disappointed because it's "different" than it used to be (e.g. more people than usual dyed their hair, too many hipsters, people were hugging too much). I want to say "it's a weird post," but it's not that weird, I guess. Just more of the same kind of stuff that comes out of the Claptrap camp.

 

Also, Tegan, that's perfect, haha.

Sounds like a classic case of "I grew up in (insert decade here) and I can't keep up with the world around me changing, including fashion trends!"

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By the way I'm seeing on Twitter that at PAX East, one of the 'enforcers' (lame attempt at security) is a GamerGater, and they are currently stalking Brianna Wu, taking pictures of her and tweeting threats. No idea if the PAX folks have made an effort to stop this person, let alone condemn them.

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The echo chamber of Twitter prevails, enforcers are not security. That said, they are still figures of authority in the scheme of PAX so this is clearly a bad situation. I think a picture of the dude is going around, so PAX staff theoretically have all the information they need to track said dude down.

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The way he complains

 

I didn't manage to stomach the whole rant, but I didn't notice that they revealed their gender in that point, or did they?

 

The hug part of the rant is just fucking weird.

 

It feels like they assume that hugs happening there is due to some mystifying aura, brainwashing techniques or cult rites, rather than the natural result of people who only see each other once a year on that kind of occasion being glad to enjoy each other's company for a while.

 

So much of GG is about getting things backwards, like this case of thinking that hugs cause respect which causes collaboration, rather than the actual progression of working together causing respect (sometimes) which leads to hugs.

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Of all possible things to be a gatekeeping asshole over... dyed hair? Really?

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