comicsansstein
No bio...
User ID: 582
comicsansstein
2mo ago
You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.
All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.
There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?
You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.
The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:
- Jon Stewart gets called "one of the good ones" with some bizarre anti-cop writing. I think it's written in-character from Harley's perspective, but still.
- Most of the (mind-controlled, hance they're the bad guys in the game) Justice League die pathetic deaths, in one case almost getting literally pissed on. But somehow Wonder Woman is immune to Brainiac's brainwashing and gets to have a dignified, dramatic moment, at least comparably.
- Also WW: her society is brought up as superior to ours, having solved issues such as toxic masculinity.
- And then there's the case of Miles Morales having wrong country's flag in his home. Representation!
Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.
A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.
Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.
I am not necessarily against copyright in its entirety. I am against DMCA, Sonny Bono act, etc. etc. and I am excited for the blighted Mouse to start slipping from under copyright at the end of this year (250 days left as of today!). I think a base of ~7 years, with possible exponentially costed extensions, would be a good enough solution.
I don't pirate games - I probably would if I were more of a retro player, but these days I have over 800 titles on steam, and that would probably last me multiple lifetimes on its own. I don't pirate books - I have a library within walking distance, and I read less than I'd like to so I have a substantial reading backlog as well. I sometimes pirate movies, because I decide on what I want to see first, and only then check if it's on netflix, and pirate otherwise. I think this one is a generational divide, with most people younger than me launching $STREAMING_SERVICE first and then browsing and deciding. Which brings me to my main point: presentism.
A significant part of our shared culture, mostly form the XXth century, is under assault by a baptist and bootlegger coalition. The bootleggers are the megacorp copyright holders and streaming owners: Disney, Netflix, etc. They want you to not care about the things that are old, because the might have unprofitable or tangled licences for it. They want you to view Current Thing only, because that's how they make most of their profits. Don't ask questions, get attached to the brand not the specific story, consume product.
The baptists are the culture warriors. Sensitivity readers who strangle books in the crib. People who lobby for some Dr Seuss books removed from circulation, for Roald Dahl books to get bowdlerized. People who get into translating Japanese media to try to oust the current western anime audience from it. Simpsons episode getting removed because Michael Jackson had a minor voice role. And so on and so forth. The baptist wants you to watch and read only the Current Thing because only the Current Thing has the correct amount of representation, of course only until it's supplanted by the next Current Thing.
(And sometimes people get worse due to sheer incompetence, like old TV series getting cropped and zoomed in to fit widescreen, because someone along the chain of command thinks that zoomers will die of confusion if they encounter letterboxing).
With that in mind, even if pirates have ulterior motives, they offer a valuable service to the culture: media preservation in the face of encroaching censorship. If you don't want your children to live in eternal Year Zero of culture war full of extruded movielike product that makes current MCU look like Bergman, you should probably buy persistent physical media and/or pirate too.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I think it's because everyone just does less. People used to be travelers, craftsmen, soldiers before they were writers, and the decades of life's experience flowed into their work. Nowadays people sit passively browsing information for hours on end, and base their writing on other books they have read, one more layer removed from reality.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
It's what TVTropers of yore called a self-demonstrating example, I believe.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies
This is a vague statement about things from a quarter-century ago which sounds plausible and yet doesn't provide specific examples and so falls apart when you try to think about anything to back it up, a technique mastered by tumblr's Prokopetz.
(Wait... that's David Prokopetz... are you...?)
There is one Van Damme movie that still has any cultural relevance, and it's Street Fighter, and that is mostly because of a exceptional performance by the late Raul Julia. Nobody cares about Timecop, or Bloodsport, or Double something, or whatever else JCVD was up to in the 90s.
Today's equivalent of Van Damme movies are Jason Statham movies, and those are hardly the cultural juggernauts.
But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them.
Once again, no examples. Let's try to provide some on our own, then.
2016, Ghostbusters - everything I've seen about this one leads me to believe that it's just not an engaging movie, with the plot strung together from unfunny improv sketches. The same would be true for a male-led movie, the level of contemporary standup and sketch comedy is just abysmal, SNL's material is so bad that being worth even a mild chuckle is a once-or-twice-a-year exception.
2017, Atomic Blonde - I'll give the screenwriters one thing, they understood that for the "female James Bond" to make sense the character needs to be at least bi, or otherwise the dynamic falls apart. Other that that and a nice Blue Monday remix, pretty boring movie. The villain had barely any sensible motivation, and the acclaimed oner action scene was a bit of form over function. Want to see a good oner? Watch the first 10 or so minutes of Climax.
2019, Birds of Prey, or a Fantabulous etc. etc. - Well this one was at least engaging. It was, however, absolutely murdered by marketing (title change), and was a followup to a flop, so it was dead on arrival. Again, the villain was a bit of a strawman, but at least there was scenery to chew. If you want female-led movies, I saw Underwater on the same day as this one and I liked it much better.
2019, Captain Marvel - this this the one that's usually talked about, isn't it? And it even made pretty enough money, I think? At that point, the MCU has been running for almost 11years, so people got tired of yet another origin story, an the main character is a flying brick whose only solution to a problem is "moar hand lazers", so the action scenes were so-so. Plus there was a weird undercurrent of... revanchism and spite in the marketing and interviews, so that would be a turnoff for the people who were on the fence (that last point is also true to a lesser degree for Ghostbusters and BoP, and to a greater degree for Battlefield V, a non-movie exmaple).
Black Widow, The Marvels - sorry, we're past the endgame, audiences are tired, everythings flopping now, Ant-Man flopped too.
Charlie's Angels - this one is was just straight up bad.
But all that enumeration in unnecessary in the face of the more important point - if I want to see a female-led and female-centric movie, I can just go see Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (shame that one of the lead actresses has quit acting since), I don't owe it to anyone to watch mediocre derivative capeshit. I don't watch Jason Statham movies either.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
I don't think that's the mainstream position. I think the mainstream position is a series of concentric lines of defense.
The first line of defense is "how dare you!?". The point and sputter, as Sailer calls it. An attempt to dissuade the opponent from even breaching the subject of whether different people have different aptitude, without addressing it. Might involve siccing the mods on the opponent, or arguing that Something Must Be Done abut the fact that such a discussion can even take place, on sites where mods aren't available or sympathetic (i.e. twitter).
The second line is to deny that measurement is possible, i.e. IQ denial. Expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
The two-and-a-half is to acknowledge that individual differences exist, but group differences don't or are irrelevant. Lewontin may be invoked.
Only after those we're approaching what you postulated as the mainstream position. Even then, the primary focus will be on present oppression, i.e. it will be argued that the result in education continue to diverge because the black students are underfunded or otherwise discriminated against. Only then, after it's shown that funding is often negatively correlated with test scores, it may be admitted that inherent group differences exist. Very cautiously and tacitly, as it may get the admitting party into hot water from the people who stopped at layer one.
comicsansstein
4mo ago
Generally speaking, I think the hypothetical seems unappealing to a straight man because the kind of woman who would agree to this kind of scenario can, with high probability, turn your life into a nightmare.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Did anyone ever ran that study controlling for other mental issues, which iirc are highly comorbid?
comicsansstein
7mo ago
The business justification is that he current CEO of Unity formerly occupied a high position in Electronic Arts, and suggested that the publishers should experiment with e.g. charging players for reloading their guns past some point in a gameplay session, when they highly price-insensitive.
Single-player, paid (as in, you pay for them once) games are a rounding error to this kind of a business-brained person. The pricing was made with Genshin Impact in mind, in an attempt to extract more money from Mihoyo (sp?). In a mobile world of freemium games, using "installation" as a measure makes more sense because accounts are revenues are usually tied to that.
comicsansstein
1yr ago
Why wouldn't the Yalta Treaty be condemned? My country was stuck on the wrong side of the curtain for 45 years because Roosevelt used us as a bargaining chip.
Edit: And before you answer, I would like you to think very carefully about the role the Red Army played in WWII, in the context of Poland.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I distinctly remember seeing a twitter thread in which a gay relationship advisor (that's bracketed (g (r a)), not ((g r) a), mind you ;) ) wrote that the religious were right, it was a slippery slope, and it's a good thing that it was. @TracingWoodgrains, help me out, I remember you conversing with that guy.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Do you believe the reports of mass repression happening in the Xinjiang region in the past decade+ to be exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth? Do you expect a random Chinese expat (?) to have accurate knowledge about the inner workings of her country, and to share that knowledge publicly?
It's June 4th tomorrow, why don't you ask her about that on Monday to calibrate how much she's willing to say about China's recent history.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Such a technology would be a perfect wedge for the trans community as it exists today. It would split the people who just want to have a different body and then move on with their lives from the people who want to always and forever be a markedly different counterculture. The latter would have to resort some nonbinary or fully posthuman neoforms to keep their unique status. Think Gibson's Tessier-Ashpool, Herbert's Harkonnen, Fading Suns' Decados, Lem's 21st Journey of Ijon Tichy. They wouldn't have existing category of people to base their status claims on. I love it.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.
Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.
These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.
(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)
Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.
comicsansstein
11mo ago
Somebody, representing "Polish fandom", even started a petition to rescind the invitation.
The letter/petition was issued by the Union of Polish Fandom Associations, i.e. a council of representatives from various cities' fadom organizations that has supervises the organization of Polcon conventions and the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. If someone has had their hand in organizing a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, they're probably one handshake from the letter's issuers. If one's been to a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, probably less than three handshakes away. So, I'd say that the claim to representation is accurate.
(I've been at the council meeting where a draft of that letter was first (?) proposed)
comicsansstein
1yr ago
In Poland, they shifted to w Ukraine in the 90s.
No we didn't. Some people shifted from "na" to "w" this year, after the Russian invasion, but it's pure wordcelery, trying to justify word changes with sort of made up stories about prejudiced connotations you're describing, like how this week's document from Stanford (?) tries to connect "hip hip hooray" to the Holocaust. Somebody using "w" became a pretty good litmus test for determining if that person is a prog.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
I'm highly interested in (a copy of) that reddit post, if you can recall any further details about it.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I think Rian Johnson did in the end consider making the hero of the story a white man a bit of a mistake, and the beginning of Glass Onion is partially an attempt to recitfy it.
(Blanc is revealed to be gay. So he's still whate, still male, but he's not all bad, see?)
comicsansstein
10mo ago
My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
If you don't copy and archive everything some of the things you remember reading will succumb to link rot.
If you do copy and archive everything, some people will pull a Regina George and ask why are you so obsessed about the subject, indicating that you caring too much should mean that they should win by fiat. Most normies are close to this, therefore I often can't bring myself to bother with the cataloguing.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
Years ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that one of the advantages of living in a country that's 98,5% monoethnic (and with most of the 1,5% being virtually indistinguishable) is that cultural tastes don't break down along ethnic lines (as the latter don't exist) and so I can safely dislike whatever the fuck I want without people trying to tar me as a racist. I still stand by that opinion.
I disliked Peja and Liroy and what-have-you back when I was a teenager, and judging from what I hear on the radio when I go to the barber, the condition of Polish hiphop has only gotten worse in the next 20 years. The beats are slower and more repetitive, the lyrics are uninspired and more repetitive, and it's hard to treat boys two thirds my age rapping about their gangsta exploits when the only actual dealer I know is a deeply pathetic person.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good". There are some passable ones i.e. I won't wince when I hear them on the radio, but my threshold for "good" is that I would like to listen to them on my own, and the last album to clear that bar was Gaga's Artpop, so 2013. There's nothing released that's catchy on the level of Song 2 or Rockafeller Skank. There are even no popstars - Taylor is the last remaining one, and this is why her fanbase is so psychotic sometimes. In better times, all this fan energy would be diffused between multiple artists.
comicsansstein
1mo ago
Babel by Rebecca Kuang, and boy oh boy is reading contemporary SFF a tiresome experience. Both the characters and the footnotes are constantly filibustering about colonialism and white people. Say what you will about Nora Jemisin, at least her anvilicious books didn't sacrifice worldbuilding for the anvils. Mostly.
comicsansstein
2mo ago
I tried to limit myself to the last decade, because that's when the complaining and metacomplaining really started.
But enough about JK Rowling!
To make myself clear: I was there, David. I was refreshing the threads on /r/TumblrInAction back in 2014, seeing the TFYC game jam fall apart months before the whole situation exploded after Eron's post, browsing and saving all the screenshot compilations. And much of what you allege is just that, allegiations. Strangely left little to no pixel trail. One specific extant thing I remember that could be treated as harassing was Rich Kyanka's review of Revolution 60. (Well, extant in the form of screenshots, the review itself has been removed from steam it seems).
There was probably a nonzero amount of threats, yes. Everyone gets those. I get anon death threats on tumblr once every few weeks, and I don't even post that much!
And if your argument to the latter is that it's bad and nobody should get those - don't. I very much prefer the internet in which I get an occasional hate mail to the one in which such a thing is infrastructurally impossible, because it would have to look much more like the Chinese internet. A site like the one we're on would be illegal/impossible/dangerous to host, for one.
(And if the argument to that is that my preferences aren't universal and we should have accommodations for people who want a controlled equilibrium rather than a free-for-all equilibrium, then of course we should! Facebooks and Linkedins for the normies on one end, SA, chans and niche subreddits on the other! The thing is, van Valkenburg herself spoke about frequenting Something Awful, so I find it wildly implausible that she was unprepared to handle some amount of heat. Or is that too mythology-building?)
But, arguendo, if the amount of insults that you're insinuating is true, this seems largely comparable to the 24/7 firehose of junk that's been directed at Rowling for the past five or so years. She has the courtesy to sometimes provide screenshots and quote tweets of those, even. I know that UK has some pretty strict laws about speech, so that probably reins in her domestic antifans a little. But other than that, nobody cares. There are no sympathetic articles, no wikipedia articles about the phenomenon. Why is it that some women are more equal than others?
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