Lovers of literary catastrophes rejoice! Some GamerGaters are crowdsourcing a book about what they see as the death of 4chan and the rise of GamerGate, and so far the results have been even more amazingly awful than that even sounds.
So far all the Gaters have managed to produce have been some rough drafts of a lyrical prologue written almost entirely in mixed metaphor, a somewhat plodding first chapter, and a rough outline of the rest of the book. But there is much comedy gold in these rough pages.
And so I would like to present to you The Nine Most Ridiculous Quotes from The Crowdsourced GamerGate Book That Were Actually Written by Real Human Beings Who Thought What They Were Writing Was Awesome.
1) The endless sea of ones and zeroes
We would not be forgotten in the endless sea of ones and zeroes that many other events have been dissolved by, but drowned by liars who could only just grasp the lowest bars of the social ladder.
2) The Steps We Took To Pull Back the Curtain
Let’s take a walk through no man’s land. What you will find here among the ash piles are evidence of lies, deception, ill-gotten gains, facades, and false morality. You will also find the mark of our footprints; the steps we took to pull back the curtain and expose the corruption around us.
3) Never Stop Riding
Hold on to your seat. The ride never ends.
4) Like Terminator or Something
I’m writing in nostalgia of a now lost past, and fear of an uncertain future. You know, like Terminator or something.
5) Fighting in a Maelstrom of Pettiness
The ugliness on both sides, and the villains, and heroes, all fighting in a maelstrom of pettiness for a future that doesn’t care for them.
6) Something Larger in the Vacuum
While on the surface it just seems like trolls feeding trolls, death threats, and angry nerds on the surface, the picture painted is of something larger moving through the cultural vacuum that is the modern west.
7) Calculated and Painful
We were scattered by a well calculated and painful defeat.
8) Like Many a Writers Have Commented
4chan is probably, and like many a writers have commented before us, one of the most important websites of its type in the English world; known even to have affected how other unrelated websites published content and worked.
9) Not Technically Illegal
Despite being a minor, a majority of Poole’s early updates to 4chan were adding explicit boards. Many critics claimed the content of these boards were of borderline legality. Originally in /b/, and later /h/ (hentai) and /d/ (hentai/alternative), anime pornography of children (lolikon) and anime pornography depicting extreme fetishes such as necrophilia (guro). Poole responded to these complaints, by reminding them that this type of pornography is not technically illegal, and the content would not be removed.
So what will this new masterpiece be called? Well, there have been many suggestions so far. A few of my favorites:
1984Chan – The Rise and Fall of 4Chan
The point is MOOT (moot does not mean what you think it means) -40 keks
Our Kampf
So whats the deal with 4chan?
To Reign in Hell: The Fall from Grace
The Willing Executioners
Poole’s Closed
404 – (Chronicle of the Executioners), (4chan Not Found), (Freedom Failed to ` Load), (Freedom Not Found)
The Caliphate of the Internet
To Kill |Crush| a |Mocking| Cloverleaf
Ooh, someone took high school English!
The heroes who rose from the pariahs
Tales of the struggles of modern-day Huckleberry Finns
Oh, yet another High School graduate!
How we tried and slew Leviathan
How to win friends and crash your community, by MOOT
We are piss babies who like to suck diaper farts
I don’t think that last one was meant completely seriously.
(I am also aware that the bit about the Terminator was probably added by a troll.)
H/T — To Literally Who herself for pointing me to this literary masterpiece. She is also organizing a crowdsourced dramatic reading of the book’s prologue.
BONUS: Here are a few more of the proposed book covers.
In the beginning, Moot created the heaven and the earth. And Moot said, Let there be chan: and there was chan. And Moot saw the chan, that it was good. And Moot decided… not to divide the light from the darkness.
Now the Social Justice Warrior was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord Moot had made. And the SJW said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely be harassed if ye partake of vidja games: And when the woman saw that the vidja games were good for playing, she took of the vidja games thereof, and did play, and really it was all just down-fucking-hill from there. And Moot multiplied man’s sorrow even though it was totally the SJW’s fault and not his and how could he help but scream at it IT WAS INVITING HIS RIB TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES AND COMMENT ON THEM AND STUFF LIKE SERIOUSLY.
Which raises the question of how the games they love came to exist in the first place. Was it all part of a cunning plan to get them hooked and then shift their addiction to the hard social justice stuff? And if the retailers are the dealers and the developers are the cartrels, who are the gaming media?
Cartels, rather. Is Zoe Quinn Scarface?
I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but…say what?! Gamergaters thought Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton would be on their side? The guy who created Buffy and the guy who gave a speech about encouraging daughters to pursue nerdy interests that was so good it went viral?
Did they just assume that because any white cishet guy would automatically support them?
Totally agree about the wiki talk page being a thing of beauty. I love it when they have to try really hard to be objective, and they can’t find anything supporting them since their own editorials and infographics don’t count.
Of course the mainstream media is corrupt and evil for reporting their acts of harassment and threats and not the positive things, such as… hmmm… just a minute… wait for it… mumble mumble ethics in gaming journalism.
@vaiyt:
That must be it. Otherwise, there’s no way they could actually see the creator of Oglaf being on their side, as only some of the oddities of Oglaf is portraying women and men as both enjoying sex in equal measure and both dressing up in ridiculously sexualized outfits.The storylines are creative, too, with none of the rehashing of tired plot points and jokes relying on sexist stereotypes that the GaperGushers love so much.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
I’d gather, since they’re basically just a videogame oriented branch of the reactive MRA movement, and we all know how they love to think that they have 50% of the population on their side.
“Men everywhere are standing up for their rights and joining us on our crusade against femin…”
“NO.”
“But…but…You were supposed to be on our side! Fine, you’re not a real man anyway! So there!”
Zen of Design places them at fewer than 10,000 Twitter accounts, so even fewer people on Twitter. They do have over 20,000 readers on KiA, 21,168 when I checked.
http://www.zenofdesign.com/weekly-roundup-gaters-gonna-gate/
This wins.
Brava. This is what I’d call memetic synergy between threads. This thread is all over awesome.
I’ve heard it’s rather tedious read, aside from the content and typos, because young Hitler’s literary skill didn’t quite match his ambition.
Now imagine if it’d been written by a mob of young Hitlers…
Hm, that does seem a tidy way to weed out people not paying any real attention who just post the occasional message of support… But I do think a considerable portion of those are still likely socks. Thank you for pointing me to that, though! That’s the first number I’ve seen that feels like it has a decent criteria for judging who’s “active”, and who is not.
A bit higher than I would have expected, though. They’ve gone for how many months with no visible progress?
I’m really torn between number 8 and 9 for my favorite.
@Shaenon:
I’ve read Shortpacked! for almost eight years now (and Dumbing of Age since it began) and I don’t think I’ve seen “Damn You” Willis mention video games more than a handful of times, and at that it’s mostly Mario games.
I don’t know where the GGers got the idea he cares about video games in the first place.
Someone posted a link to Monster of the Week in a thread here a couple weeks ago, BTW, and I loved it. I probably ought to let you know on the MotW website, but I had to sign up and was just too lazy.
“Nerd heroes like Wil Wheaton and Joss Whedon had Tweeted against them! How could this be?
Even webcartoonists hated them! The Penny Arcade guys, despite not being big feminists themselves, had already given Gamergate a big nope, and so had most other gaming cartoonists. (I followed David “Shortpacked” Willis’s Twitter feed with evil delight while they tried to win him over. He’s the biggest liberal and feminist on the planet, as anyone could figure out from three seconds of reading his comics.) Finally someone commented, “At least we still have Oglaf,” to which my immediate response was, oh, you poor little boys. Sure enough, they went running to the Twitter feed of Oglaf creator Trudy Cooper, who responded with something along the lines of, “I have no idea what that is. …Wait, it’s that? No, why would anyone think I’d support that?”
(Possibly they didn’t know Oglaf is drawn by a woman. Possibly they did know and are just that self-deluded.)
So now, as far as I know, they’re boycotting all webcomics. It brings a warm glow to my heart.”
I am an aspiring webcartoonist myself, so this makes me very happy.
They got Goblins’ author to subscribe to NotYourShield 🙁
Thunt tries hard to be nice and not to hurt anyone, but that has lead him to buy into the middle ground fallacy on many issues, and he thinks GG’s opponents are just as bad. (GGers wave a Reddit account with his name around that supports them virulently, but I’m pretty sure it’s a sock, Thunt would be physically incapable of spamming like that, he’s a massive perfectionnist, whenever he fears being misunderstood he writes multiple drafts, posting walls of texts minutes apart on a hot topic is not him. They wish he was a hateful misogynist, but the worst I’d pin on him is being naive.)
Jane,
There’s a blog from early/mid-September that has some estimate, but it’s a very rough one.
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/09/gamergate-small-support.html
The amount of real devotees could be up or down since September, the early estimate isn’t accurate enough to tell.
A more recent post on the same blog puts the based base below 10,000 core supporters:
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/10/gamergate-intel-boycott.html
Those numbers suggest that if GamerGate grew during September, it has stopped doing so since early October. Thus that’s two months of no progress at the very least.
But anecdotally it does look like GamerGate is in fact shrinking at the moment. They have not had a significant success that can function as a recruitment drive since Intel’s mess-up. So that’s good news. The bad news is that if there is a decline, it’s so slow. Hopefully all the misguided teenagers will have left GamerGate in a couple of months, only leaving the tragics in.
Ugh, that’s terrible news 🙁 . I know a few people who enjoy that comic…
I’m not certain as to how much weight to place on those numbers, though… They seem to mostly be based on the twitter activity, but their assumptions listed in the second post seem somewhat off, as the data collected here would seem to indicate: https://medium.com/@MikeRTrice/gamergate-in-data-perspective-part-ii-gamergate-data-versus-gaming-data-9323ed68535f
The other datapoint offered was reddit community subscriptions, but that doesn’t really seem very indicative – that number recently reached 20,000, but #GamerGate activity doesn’t seem to have increased during that timeframe – if anything, it seems to have fallen.
I do agree that it feels like they’re shrinking, but… These two blog posts seem a bit too rough to tell, when dealing with such a small group.
Correct! I can’t bear to read it either save for a few paragraphs, but I did read Ralph Manheim’s translator’s note. Manheim (ethnically Jewish, by the way, which is why people on neo-Nazi forums advise against his translation) sought to stick as closely as possible to Hitler’s syntax and grammatical mistakes. He notes that because Mein Kampf was written under the influence of Austrian newspapers, whose style was “slovenly, illogical, pretentious”, its prose overflows with journalistic cliches, periphrastic pseudo-philosophical bombast, and “long, intricate sentences in which he frequently gets lost”, although Hitler does ocasionally shed his literary pretensions to write one of his trademark speaches. apparently it’s so atrocious that Manheim ocasionally has to confirm to the reader that yes, the terrible sentence you’ve just read is an accurate translation of what he actually wrote: “Where Hitler’s formulations challenge the reader’s credulity, I have quoted the German original in the notes. Seeing is believing.” Not to conflate the two, but judging by what I’ve read of the Gamergate hagiography, their style seems to be afflicted with similar pomposity, except without the flights of elloquence, however rare. it’s just putrid, clumsy, cliched prose shit through and through.
I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but…say what?! Gamergaters thought Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton would be on their side? The guy who created Buffy and the guy who gave a speech about encouraging daughters to pursue nerdy interests that was so good it went viral?
Did they just assume that because any white cishet guy would automatically support them?
Yeah, they seem to have no critical facilities whatsoever, which I guess is why they get so angry and confused over friggin’ video game reviews.
Also in that post-Colbert thread, someone bemoaning the loss of Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton commented that if Neil Gaiman turned out to be a feminist, too, he’d lose all hope. Oh, honey.
so i discovered a hilarious thing where gg’ers are taking credit for an ftc “truth in advertising” program that was under way before the ftc heard of gg.
http://www.donotlink.com/co1u
operation full disclosure was an ftc program to identify problems with disclosure of advertising in traditional media. ftc sent 60 warning letters to media outlets that were not adequately disclosing important details of advertisements (by hiding in fine print or quoting misleading prices).
some gg’er wrote to ftc to ask that this be expanded to include gawker, because gawker includes links to amazon in their stories, which is not remotely the same thing.
ftc wrote back to say no, but they are already working on an online advertising project & to hold their horses for a few months for guidance to be released.
gg’er misunderstood this clear statement & also the way gov’t works & the glacial speed at which gov’t works in order to take credit for this pre-existing program.
then i found it and lol’ed.
a bunch of very credulous gg’ers congratulate selves: https://twitter.com/TheRalphRetort/status/537040021216165888
Well, there’s my laugh for the day. Thank you Shaenon and/or the dumbass whose comments she observed.
It takes a special way of looking at the world to see the unanimity of opprobrium as validation of your correctness.
The only halfway mainstream member of the chattering class to express even lukewarm support for the Gaters is Andrew effin’ Sullivan. How that would dismay them (if they even knew who Sullivan was). And even he’s getting some pushback from his readers.
Claiming credit for things that they had nothing to do with but happen to support? Truly they are part of the Manosphere.
I’ve been laughing like an idiot at “To Reign in Hell: The Fall from Grace” for a good few minutes now. It’s like that old Onion magazine cover, “Macaulay Culkin: The Lion In Winter”