"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Merus]

4chan uses awareness of in-jokes, memes, and social rules as a metric for dividing those invested in the community from casual visitors, which groups will always do because they are made up of humans. Take here on the Idle Thumbs forums - post counts partly serve this purpose, but the community mostly determines who is valuable to it by reputation. (Communities less inclined to remember why certain people should be remembered tend to fixate on post count as an metric of investment in the group.) Because the archives of 4chan are essentially unbrowsable, remembering what happened in them is the only real metric 4chan has to determine who's been around for a while. Memetic references then become the way a user says 'in this post, I am speaking as a senior member'.

 

Honestly I reckon that's where the 'creativity' comes from: because references to past memorable events are essentially required to be respected, it means they'll force those memes in any old way.

[Gormongous]

That's a really great post, Fingus. I'd almost rather defer to your perspective on this, but I'm an idiot loudmouth.

 

Because the archives of 4chan are essentially unbrowsable, remembering what happened in them is the only real metric 4chan has to determine who's been around for a while. Memetic references then become the way a user says 'in this post, I am speaking as a senior member'.

 

I mean, that's not entirely true for some boards. I don't know how they do now, but /tg/ used to archive some of its threads regularly and posts summaries of others that the community missed or were too unfocused to be worth the space. The use of tripcodes is also encouraged to make popular members of previous threads recognizable, especially creators of homebrew games and systems, although I know that tripcodes are met with extreme hostility on a lot of other boards.

 

But yeah, the broad strokes of what you say are true, especially of the more public-facing elements of 4chan.

[Henroid]

GamerGate is starting to use the term "digital Apartheid" in reference to the GG Autoblocker. I think they should pack it in, as far as bastardizing language.

[tabacco]

GamerGate is starting to use the term "digital Apartheid" in reference to the GG Autoblocker. I think they should pack it in, as far as bastardizing language.

 

Because 'e-partheid' would have been the way superior version.

[JonCole]

lol

 

[Gormongous]

GamerGate is starting to use the term "digital Apartheid" in reference to the GG Autoblocker. I think they should pack it in, as far as bastardizing language.

 

I imagine their more studious members trolling history books, searching for fresh atrocities from the past to take up as emblems of their flagging movement. My money's on the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre next. A rash of sudden and treacherous assassinations by reactionary forces leaves an open and vital movement for reform crippled for want of leaders, forcing it to become increasingly radicalized and eventually sidelined? It's just barely dramatic, confused, and inapt enough to quality.

 

I guess I reference the Wars of Religion in this thread a lot. They just fit the situation so well: a cultural force with a universalizing ideology, once dominant, making war upon progressive reformers just for existing, without any awareness that their moment has passed and that they should just look to their own borders. Even the bizarre fixation of individuals as flashpoints, regardless of how commonplace their views are, works to a disturbing degree: Luther was and Quinn is hated for being Luther and Quinn, respectively; even if the Ninety-Five Theses and Depression Quest were to vanish from existence, their attackers wouldn't let up.

[JonCole]

Ugh, Greg Miller is going to be on TB's podcast. I really like Greg and have defended him when people gave him shit before because I really think he loves games and he's just trying to have a good time, but lending any credibility to TB is pretty indefensible to me. There are some people I like that have been on TB's podcast since his meltdown that I've given more of a benefit of the doubt to because they are on the Polaris Media thing so they have a business obligation to participate, but as far as I know Greg has no such arrangement with Polaris so this is all him.

 

Edit: Also, a cursory (and always regrettable) scan of TB's recent tweets reveals him shitting on the author of the new Thor series (that he says has bad writing) for a GG jab then being corrected by someone because the panel isn't even from the main Thor comic. Of course he doubled down on his comment, it just so happened that he intently shit on the author of a comic with a female leader character instead of doing the minimal amount of research first. On an even less relevant note, I recently read that the latest lady-Thor series has sold way better than Thor: God of Thunder, the last Thor Odinson series.

[jennegatron]

Ugh, Greg Miller is going to be on TB's podcast. I really like Greg and have defended him when people gave him shit before because I really think he loves games and he's just trying to have a good time, but lending any credibility to TB is pretty indefensible to me. There are some people I like that have been on TB's podcast since his meltdown that I've given more of a benefit of the doubt to because they are on the Polaris Media thing so they have a business obligation to participate, but as far as I know Greg has no such arrangement with Polaris so this is all him.

 

Oreo Oration is one of my favorite things on the internet, but that really brings me down to hear that he's talking to TotalBooger. I had to unsusbcribe to his youtube channel because it flooded my subscription list with his libertarian roommate spouting off nonsense all the time, but I will defend Oreo Oration to the ends of the earth.

[Henroid]

I can't wait to find out what digital Rwanda is. Or digital-Contra.

[Dewar]

I am excited for all the announcements that got made all of GDC between Offworld, OAPI/CrashOverride team-up, etc.

 

Maybe I misunderstood that timeline on this thing, but http://offworld.com/ seems to be up and running. I'm not a fan of the site layout, but the couple articles I read are pretty good. I already pre-ordered "Her Story."

[Merus]

My favourite thing about GG complaining about the blocker is that its heuristics are pretty simple and easily gamed, yet they still can't get past it.

[Apple Cider]

Maybe I misunderstood that timeline on this thing, but http://offworld.com/ seems to be up and running. I'm not a fan of the site layout, but the couple articles I read are pretty good. I already pre-ordered "Her Story."

I posted it on the 6th, the site was up by the 9th.

[Merus]

[JonCole]

whatdidtotalbiscuitdonow.tumblr.com

[TychoCelchuuu]

Believes that fiction with political messages is “regressive”

This one from only a few hours ago. He's addicted to being a total shitbiscuit and he doesn't know how to stop.

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha what fiction with a political message is regressive?

Christ what an idiot.

[Bjorn]

whatdidtotalbiscuitdonow.tumblr.com

 

 

Wow, that led me to this absolutely stunningly informative and obviously factually accurate and well researched exchange on how gender shapes gaming preferences. 

 

tldr: Women don't like certain games because biology, and that's why god made hidden object games for them and men have DOTA. 

[Twig]

That is distressingly similar to a conversation I had with a co-worker once while sitting in a Hooters-of-a-different-name (Twin Peaks... Listen I was tricked I didn't know what it was until we got there!). Except instead of video games it was women not wanting to look at sexy dudes because only men find looking at sexy people fun.

This isn't really relevant, but it pains me that this is such an easy and common opinion.

[Bjorn]

It's exactly the attitude that says women are naturally not attracted to math, or don't enjoy the sciences, or that they aren't good with complex machinery.  Because men like them don't want women in spaces they think of as theirs. 

 

In the uncondensed version of that thread (with all the noise from their respective followers), there's a fascinating exchange with Adrian in which someone provides sources showing that the male readership for romance novels is statistically the same as the male readership of all fiction (~20 percent).  Not conclusive, but the point being that 1) romance novels have significant numbers of men reading them and 2) it's not unreasonable to expect that if overall fiction reading by men increased, the number of men reading romance fiction would increase as well.   And that all sails right over Adrian's head and he takes the sources she linked to as proof he was right. 

[Gormongous]

Haha what fiction with a political message is regressive?

Christ what an idiot.

 

As he clarifies later in the tweet thread, it's any fiction where the political message is unsubtle enough for him to notice it. As far as I can tell from his words, throughout time, humanity has striven to create truly apolitical characters in artistic works in order to be appealing to everyone everywhere, but only with the power of mass media and focus groups in the twentieth century has that become truly possible. Nowadays, when he sees a character who thinks, says, or does something with which anyone could disagree, it pains him, because it threatens to drag us back into dark times like the Romantic Era, when no one could enjoy art because they were all too busy being offended by it!

 

I'm beginning to see all too well that TB is not terribly articulate, but unwilling to hold off commenting on something until he's got his thoughts together, so he is perpetually caught defending stupid shit that he can't let himself admit meant how he said it. In this case, he doesn't enjoy characters that feel like mouthpieces for their creators' beliefs, but just to say that sounds like an Opinion, the most dreaded of all statements, so instead he spits out nonsense that looks like it could have come out of the mouth of Will H. Hays, thereby graduating from Opinion to Fact.

 

As has been said many times before, I'd feel sorry for him if he wasn't a self-righteous dick about his own ignorance and the harm it causes.

[Merus]

I think he thinks he has his thoughts together, because he's not capable of recognising that he doesn't know dick about anything. He thinks the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't apply to him, because he's smart, but not smart enough to realise that you never learned how to deal with being wrong.

[Irishjohn]

Yeah, he has his thoughts together alright, they're just juvenile in their sophistication. This is a man that has actually made the "if you think women are that fragile maybe YOU are the sexist" argument, which is about as clever as "I know you are but what am I."

 

He's an idiot, basically.

 

It doesn't mitigate the fact that he's awful; I think he genuinely believes he has every right to send his creepy twitter followers after people as part of personal arguments, it doesn't make it okay.

[Gormongous]

I think he thinks he has his thoughts together, because he's not capable of recognising that he doesn't know dick about anything. He thinks the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't apply to him, because he's smart, but not smart enough to realise that you never learned how to deal with being wrong.

Yeah, he has his thoughts together alright, they're just juvenile in their sophistication. This is a man that has actually made the "if you think women are that fragile maybe YOU are the sexist" argument, which is about as clever as "I know you are but what am I."

He's an idiot, basically.

It doesn't mitigate the fact that he's awful; I think he genuinely believes he has every right to send his creepy twitter followers after people as part of personal arguments, it doesn't make it okay.

Oh, I don't disagree. I suppose I just considered "has the depth and maturity of thought to realize that one has nothing to contribute on a topic" to be part of having one's thoughts together, but it's true that, in most cases, a moment of introspection would probably not improve the final product that comes out of TB's mouth. He quite literally cannot conceived of a situation in which his opinion is not welcome, and that makes him both pathetic and terrifying to me.

I also just wonder what it must be like to be TB, to consider myself one of the really smart people out there and to see others who seem smart like I know myself to be having brief but enlightening conversations with each other, but who suddenly lose the ability to articulate basic concepts in a way that I understand when I try to have one of those conversations, too. I wonder if I'd wonder what there could be about my intellect, in breadth or depth or width, that makes apparently smart people lose the ability to communicate effectively with me, another smart person. I wonder if I'd be as lazy as TB and just redefine intelligence as the ability to speak to me, a self-evidently intelligent person, in a way that I understand.

[twmac]

Sorry to dogpile on TB (I am sure his esteem can handle it) but this got linked to me and I had to laugh, bitterly:

 

https://twitter.com/finryan87/status/578559056538914816

[Vainamoinen]

The author's note to John Green's The Fault in Our Stars reads as follows.

 

This is not so much an author’s note as an author’s reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.

 

Neither novels or their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

 

I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

 

 

Gamergate, by default, is a bunch of idiots with no idea whatsoever how stories work. They are, however, dead sure that their game stories would slowly but surely reflect and infuse them with political ideas.

 

That, of course, destroys the unwritten contract between storyteller and listener as described by Green; they're so hell bent on finding a political subtext that even the most basic motifs of philantropy and inclusion, which we find in stories since antiquity, suddenly are political statements.

 

THEY ARE NOT.

 

Stories transcend the political. The ideas, the ideology, the philosophy found in stories transcend the political. Remove the ideas, the ideology, the philosophy and they're not stories any more.

 

That is one of gamergate's actual goals, whether they are aware of it or not. By wanting the political out of their games — whatever that is even supposed to mean — they want stories out of their games.

 

Incredible how Chmielarz still licks Bain's boots in that respect. He should know better. But I guess they have far too much in common concerning their stated view of women gamers.

 

 

 

(edit: And now I have understood that the weird acting up on the forum when I tried to spell out p.c. is probably one of Jake's little censorship jokes. Well done, sir, well done.)