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yeah I don't drink tears, I use them in my moisturizer. 

 

Truthfully though, while it's fun for a laugh now and then, I tend to not go really deep into that ironic misandry because after a while, you realize it's not very radical praxis.

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That post reminded me of something I thought of the other day: I want somebody to make a browser plug-in that switches every instance of "radical" to some other 80s/90s slang.

 

"Today the President revealed a tubular plan to save Obamacare."

 

"I have to say, I don't agree with the bodacious tone of these comments."

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yeah I don't drink tears, I use them in my moisturizer.

Truthfully though, while it's fun for a laugh now and then, I tend to not go really deep into that ironic misandry because after a while, you realize it's not very radical praxis.

What if everyone did it as well as Elizabeth Simmons?

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I don't agree with her either.  ^_^

 

True personal fact: I used to really be into that stuff until I realized that white feminists have a huge amount of institutional power regarding a lot of men, particularly men of color and so that sort of stuff is no longer interesting to me. 

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So two artists I follow on tumblr finally released the project they'd been working on for a year just two weeks ago. They got some complaints about it being culturally insensitive (I haven't gotten around to reading it, but it's set in Japan and both the creators are white, though they have mentioned having a BA in Japanese and working in Japan at some point). After some deliberation on their part, they've now decided not to continue it. Not entirely sure how I feel about the whole situation, but kudos to them for deciding to agree with their critics and accept that their work was in poor taste, especially after having previously defended it. That takes a certain level of distancing oneself from one's work and self-image that most people aren't capable of.

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So two artists I follow on tumblr finally released the project they'd been working on for a year just two weeks ago. They got some complaints about it being culturally insensitive (I haven't gotten around to reading it, but it's set in Japan and both the creators are white, though they have mentioned having a BA in Japanese and working in Japan at some point). After some deliberation on their part, they've now decided not to continue it. Not entirely sure how I feel about the whole situation, but kudos to them for deciding to agree with their critics and accept that their work was in poor taste, especially after having previously defended it. That takes a certain level of distancing oneself from one's work and self-image that most people aren't capable of.

I don't know the specifics of that situation, but it reminds me of the confusion I and others face regarding increasing diverse representation versus cultural appropriation. We had a nice little talk over in the Game Development thread but this tweet (and the first comment to it) reminded me of it yesterday.

https://twitter.com/sererena/status/572851759770574848

In the Game Development thread, the conclusion that folks helped me come to was to just go ahead and try to increase representation of diversity in my games and commit to making corrections when I inevitably fuck up.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/9864-representation-of-minorities-in-your-game-when-you-arent-a-minority/

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Talking about Japanese culture, it's super weird to me how the trope of "the honorable Japanese warrior" shit came to be... like I get that the trope comes from surface level importation of Samurai class and Bushido mixed with glorification of Japanese culture by anime fans.  But any glance at actual history makes it clear that Samurais as active warrior class were one of the most treacherous assholes in history.  It's interesting when overtly comedic game like "Skull of the Shogun" gets that feel better than so many other modern fictions (The Blacklist cough cough).

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It's cool though that there's quite a bit of japanese media as old as Rashomon that deconstructs the mythos. Come to think of it, most of the "scruffy, morally enlightened warrior" tropes I've come across are depicted as ronin or in some other way outside the social order.

Still I'm waiting for a good Sengoku era Wolf Hall.

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Still I'm waiting for a good Sengoku era Wolf Hall.

 

I don't quite have that for you, but if you're also interested in China there's a fantastic Chinese TV series called Three Kingdoms that's absolutely worth watching if you're into in historical far east political/military machinations and don't mind subtitles. There are a few shows that have similar names and are about the same time, but the one you're looking for

.

 

Honestly, I also don't know of a better way to get hold of it than YouTube, because as far as I'm aware it was never released outside of China and the subtitling is entirely fan driven.

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Blambo, on 05 Mar 2015 - 08:07, said:

Still I'm waiting for a good Sengoku era Wolf Hall.

Are you aware of Shiba Ryoutarou? He was a wildly successful author of historical fiction, including some set in the Sengoku period, and he's pretty beloved, both in mass culture and by some members of literary elite. (Abe Kobo really liked him, although that's maybe a weird example because he was an outsider himself.) I don't know how many are translated, though. Glancing at Amazon, the ones in English appear to be set very late pre-Meiji and early Meiji... I honestly can't recommend a particular book either, because it's not really my thing. I just know a lot of people who read him, and his books get adaptations all the time.

Japan (supposedly-- it's not really my thing) has a lot of good historical fiction, but what gets translated tends to either be pure literary fiction or popular but not literary fiction.

It was written a few hundred years earlier than Sengoku era itself, but if classics are okay you could also just read Tale of Heike for warrior politics in Japan in the middle of an earlier civil war. The McCullough and Tyler translations are both fine. (Both are accurate. McCullough is a little flatter but more reliably readable, Tyler's is better when its good and worse when its bad.)

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So reading the GDC tweets, Soren live tweeted an interesting revelation for me... it was about League of Legends' community management talk I think, and the speaker (Lin?) stated (I suppose with healthy amount of evidence, I assume the speaker works with Riot and has all the information needed to come to this conclusion properly) that muting players actually encouraged the muted player to act out worse, and it required more clear condemnation for better odds at reforming behavior.

 

I mean I suppose on some level this is super basic and I should have expected it (incentive to reform improves odd of reforming).  And I still worry about condemnation mutating into its own abuse (which is also certainly nothing new given history), but still, controlled and managed punishment (I never played LoL, so I'm assuming that its report system isn't a good platform to dish out your own abuse) certainly seem to prove itself to improve online behavior.

 

If the data is correctly interpreted (and I assume they are), this certainly proves my previous notion about pursing better blocking tool INSTEAD of trying to reform abusers very wrong.

 

Here is the tweet BTW.

 

https://twitter.com/SorenJohnson/status/573605647469563904

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It looks like this was probably "More Science Behind Shaping Behaviors in Games" by Jeffrey Lin, who's a studied psychologist, I think, and in charge of the department of social systems at Riot, which essentially means coming up with ways to address toxicity in their game.

 

I haven't really played League in a while, but I've been watching that part of it with great intent. They seem super dedicated to making it better through everything from little messages on loading bars about how your behaviour and conduct affects teamplay and odds of winning (surprisingly effective for making people reconsider, apparently), to letting people reward other players for good conduct with medals that eventually change how their loading screen icon looks when enough accumulate, to rewarding people with game-currency for taking part in the community tribunal that evaluates reported cases (you are only rewarded if your decision matches the overall vote, so no point in just clicking through them) to just making it easy to report people for reasons anywhere between not being sporting, to actively being abusive, to having an inappropriate username. All the while keeping extensive statistics on what is effective and what isn't, with the same rigor with which they monitor the performance of individual champions to find out who's due for a balance update.

 

I never really noticed how nice that was because I don't play online with strangers that often, but then I recently popped back into TF2 to check out their grappling hook biz, and there was a person on the server I was on whose username was just a combination of slurs and I very much missed the option to just click on a button somewhere to make some higher authority aware that this was making the game unpleasant for me.

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So my assumptions on the speakers is probably correct.  Cool.

 

I think Riot's effort certainly seems great for games and good on them (well I'm sure they are doing this for profit but still) for pursuing this.  But I wonder how much of what's learned here can be tweaked for other mediums?  Like, 'banning' people from social network is a pretty huge deal and has more political dangers associated with it (as much as I dislike getting called 'gook' for example, any method used to ban it broadly (more than say, a game) has way too many far more damning usage that I would rather hear deal with the slur than the alternative) compared to getting banned on LoL.  And if the system was automated (I assume to large degree that it is automated to handle the number of reports) it would be really difficult to prevent bigotry driven banning attempts.

 

I forget which service it was... maybe it was Youtube (lol) that had this function of hiding (not deleting) comments with lot of negative/spam reports but still giving you option of seeing it... whole lot safer than banning but would it be as effective?  Also I think Youtube no longer has that feature for whatever the reason.

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The biggest problem LoL has is that's it's built around a reinforcing feedback loop. If you're winning, you start winning faster, which makes small differences in skill dramatically larger. It's... not a good thing for a team game.

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The biggest problem LoL has is that's it's built around a reinforcing feedback loop. If you're winning, you start winning faster, which makes small differences in skill dramatically larger. It's... not a good thing for a team game.

 

I think LoL has a problem more specific than that. In most games, there are limits to the incompetence of your teammates. No matter how bad a teammate is in most games, at worst you're effectively fighting 4v5. LoL, and MOBАs in general make a bad player substantially worse than no player at all. I think that's where a lot of the vitriol in most Lords Management scenes comes from. Even if no one is playing that badly, the possibility makes people much more prepared to get angry (and this being the internet, lots of people automatically assume maximum incompetence at the first mistake).

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And if the system was automated (I assume to large degree that it is automated to handle the number of reports) it would be really difficult to prevent bigotry driven banning attempts.

 

I forget which service it was... maybe it was Youtube (lol) that had this function of hiding (not deleting) comments with lot of negative/spam reports but still giving you option of seeing it... whole lot safer than banning but would it be as effective?  Also I think Youtube no longer has that feature for whatever the reason.

 

I'm not sure that it is. I'm not entirely up to date on how they do things, but I think most of the reports from casual play go into that player tribunal, where players in good standing decide whether or not something is worthy of punishment (of which there is a sliding scale from temporary bans to permanent bans). That system could still be abused, I guess, but they do have a lot of checks in place to make sure that people put enough effort into it: there's a reward for judging cases, but you only get it if your assassment is in line with the majority vote (and it increases with every "correct" vote in succession, I think), plus you can only review so many cases a day, so better make these count.

 

I'm pretty sure Riot also keeps tabs on the outcomes of these tribunals, although I'm not sure if they have somebody wave through all results or just do spot checks. One fun thing though is that they do email you after a decision has been reached if you reported the person in question, which is a nice way of seeing that you're being taken seriously.

 

Your suggestion matches one relatively recent change: all-chat defaults to off since something like a year, I think, to make it harder for people to smacktalk the other team at least.

 

The biggest problem LoL has is that's it's built around a reinforcing feedback loop. If you're winning, you start winning faster, which makes small differences in skill dramatically larger. It's... not a good thing for a team game.

 

Kind of, yeah, but they do have a few ways they try to keep that under control too. Like how the second and third towers are closer together, and stronger too I think (which makes it easier for people to retreat) and lanes are closer to each other (which makes it easier for people to go help their teammates in another lane if they are attacked). There's a cap to how strong people can get, too, so if you keep your wits about you and defend well you often have a chance to bounce back.

 

I get what you mean though. You're kind of in for the ride once you're in a game, and there's a lot of pressure, especially if things aren't going your way.

 

I think LoL has a problem more specific than that. In most games, there are limits to the incompetence of your teammates.

 

That doesn't seem all that specific. Having a teammate in team deathmatch who's basically just cannon fodder for the other team is also worse than not having them there. It's probably more a product of the small team size and long match duration: if you suck at the game, then you might be helping the other team quite a bit over the course of half an hour. The clearly defined roles also lend themselves well to shifting blame I guess.

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Yeah, I think the specific issue with a lot of Lords Managements, rather than FPS multiplayer, is that you can lose for a solid hour. And, for that matter, it can be very clear that you're going to lose for a sizeable chunk of that hour. I think that if you take winning or losing seriously, that is a real trial to endure, and people get very angry about it ...

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I think any team game where you can play for half an hour or more suffers from that dynamic. I see it in CS:GO or NS2 often enough. I think people are insulated from bad team mates in casual CS:GO but its life or death when you're in 5v5 Match Making. It's kind of similar with NS2 although you see more rages in public game modes than 6v6 comp. multiplayer.

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So I think these posts by a guy named Fredrik deBoer are really interesting critiques of social justice as it's actually practiced: this one talks about 'critique drift', where the language used to describe problems becomes a shibboleth, and thus made meaningless; and this one, which criticises the idea of social justice activism being limited to 'raising awareness' and 'describing experiences' by asking how much of it is actually taking the fight to the enemy. This one I've linked in the Gamergate thread, but honestly it's the one that gets my hackles up most because it's condemning something I agree is pretty shoddy in ways that make me realise I'm not that far removed.

 

I do get extraordinarily uncomfortable that we've got a very sizable Feminism thread on a forum that's overwhelmingly male, which implies that somewhere in there are pages and pages of men essentially patting themselves on the back for recognising that a system exists to privilege them and then assume that this means they have escaped its clutches.

 

I've heard similar complaints about specific incidents before (for instance: Donald Sterling has been racist for years, but it took him actually saying racist words for it to be considered a problem) but I feel like this does a good job of actually identifying and describing a trend that's been floating around for years.

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This feminism thread in that respect, is slightly better than other feminism threads I've been in. The last forum I was on (and left, actually, despite being there for years) had a feminism thread I started that ended up being so "well-meaning" but full of male allies not grokking 101 stuff that all of the women basically stopped posting. I almost left Idle Thumbs initially because I have a hard time dealing with men sometimes in any feminism topic. 

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So I think these posts by a guy named Fredrik deBoer are really interesting critiques of social justice as it's actually practiced: this one talks about 'critique drift', where the language used to describe problems becomes a shibboleth, and thus made meaningless; and this one, which criticises the idea of social justice activism being limited to 'raising awareness' and 'describing experiences' by asking how much of it is actually taking the fight to the enemy. This one I've linked in the Gamergate thread, but honestly it's the one that gets my hackles up most because it's condemning something I agree is pretty shoddy in ways that make me realise I'm not that far removed.

 

I do get extraordinarily uncomfortable that we've got a very sizable Feminism thread on a forum that's overwhelmingly male, which implies that somewhere in there are pages and pages of men essentially patting themselves on the back for recognising that a system exists to privilege them and then assume that this means they have escaped its clutches.

 

I've heard similar complaints about specific incidents before (for instance: Donald Sterling has been racist for years, but it took him actually saying racist words for it to be considered a problem) but I feel like this does a good job of actually identifying and describing a trend that's been floating around for years.

 

Starting to read few of them now but yeah the whole 'raise awareness' bit always puzzled me not because I don't think awareness shouldn't be raised, but it's like to some people that's their end goal.  That's why I appreciate when focus is on improving income and security for disenfranchised, but I also have bit of weird view on world (I'm far less hostile to core concepts of capitalism than the popular opinion shared here, also lot more 'militant') so who knows.

 

This feminism thread in that respect, is slightly better than other feminism threads I've been in. The last forum I was on (and left, actually, despite being there for years) had a feminism thread I started that ended up being so "well-meaning" but full of male allies not grokking 101 stuff that all of the women basically stopped posting. I almost left Idle Thumbs initially because I have a hard time dealing with men sometimes in any feminism topic. 

 

Well please let me know I'm being a dummy sometimes because I'm not too well versed in that topic.

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Starting to read few of them now but yeah the whole 'raise awareness' bit always puzzled me not because I don't think awareness shouldn't be raised, but it's like to some people that's their end goal.  That's why I appreciate when focus is on improving income and security for disenfranchised, but I also have bit of weird view on world (I'm far less hostile to core concepts of capitalism than the popular opinion shared here, also lot more 'militant') so who knows.

 

I think the idea is that if everyone is made aware enough, they'll all realize how important it is.

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I think the idea is that if everyone is made aware enough, they'll all realize how important it is.

 

Right, but that's still a stepping stone (which is perfectly fine, having short term goals help us tackle big challenges systematically).  Someone who became aware still has to take another action based on their new information.

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Right, but that's still a stepping stone (which is perfectly fine, having short term goals help us tackle big challenges systematically).  Someone who became aware still has to take another action based on their new information.

 

If everyone in the world was aware, then behavior change would come naturally I guess? For behavior-only issues, being aware that there is a problem is the biggest chunk. One would assume that the vast majority would work naturally to fix problems once they're aware there are problems. I definitely see your point for something like cancer awareness, in which you both have to be aware, and willing/able to donate. But if everyone is aware that a word is hurtful, then only those intending to be hurtful will say it, and it will become stigmatized. 

 

It's weird wording for sure.

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