Over on Return of Kings, one brave gamer dares to ask the question of our age: What will the world look like after the inevitable triumph of GamerGate?
I know, I know, just humor him for a few minutes. Because he has a rather, well, revealing notion of what triumph will look like, and it’s not one that’s compatible with the #NotYourShield propaganda that GamerGaters use to disguise its retrograde goals. Greendestiny, a veteran of TheRedPill and KotakuInAction on Reddit, sees in the video game “war” a new opportunity for gamebros to become Game Men:
It is my personal belief that, after GamerGate, video games will evolve to become a tool for raising a new generation of men. Our current education system fails horribly at providing real information on how the world works, what motivates people, and how to get laid.
Our education system is a disaster! Can you believe that not one college in the United States offers a major in Getlaidology?
More importantly, it pussifies men and turns them into starry-eyed believers in the Disney variety of life and love.
Huh. You know, there’s a cultural critic who’s made some interesting videos challenging the sexist tropes you can find in Disney movies and elsewhere in popular culture. Her name is Anita Sarkee… oh wait. Never mind.
The entire concept of sitting quietly and reading is meant for girls. Boys need the fight, the challenge, competition, and a test of their strength.
So why exactly are you trying to convince guys of this in a post you expect them to sit down and read? Shouldn’t your blog post be a video game or an arm-wrestling contest or something?
Games were always learning tools. Now they can become a tool for learning greater masculinity.
If by masculinity you mean “the proper sequence of buttons to push that will enable you to pull off an awesome combo.”
To become real men, boys must overcome challenges and find the true strength in themselves. Whether this is done in a virtual or real arena is irrelevant. By creating games that are consciously aimed at presenting a proper challenge, we can collectively make the world a better place for the next generation of men. And possibly help them get laid more.
“Hey, babe, I bet you didn’t know you were sitting next to a Level 90 Fire Mage.”
But seriously for a second: Yes, video games do teach gamers certain skills, and even something about the value of persistence. But why are the skills involved in, say, shooting dudes with maximum efficiency in Call of Duty any more intrinsically valuable, or “masculine,” than the skills involved in doing this?
@ kirbywarp – That sounds about right. Funny story: my father and uncles are quite conservative, but not a one of them – not even the Bible-thumpin’ minister – have a single doubt in their minds that Climate Change is real. Why? Because they’re ice fishermen, and they’ve watched the season for their sport getting shorter and shorter over the last twenty years.
@Falconer – Max von Sydow? I didn’t even know he was still around!
I had glanced at the teaser trailer; it was the white male tears bit I wasn’t aware of. I was mostly looking at John Boyega ‘cos he reminded me a bit of Sharif Atkins from ER. I’d be chuffed if he and Daisy Ridley were the leads, even though I’ve no intention of seeing the film. 🙂
If Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford have to do any fighting, it’s going to be the live-action version of Carl fighting Charles F. Muntz.
http://youtu.be/63Wv4e_k0nw
I went through that fear at the start of the 80s, when I was in my teens. Even that late, that fear was still around.
@Lea – for me it was the documentary-style drama The War Game. It was made by the BBC in 1965 and I saw it in 1981. Absolutely terrifying.
@Professor fate – ::waves:: Hi and welcome!
On the illegal drugs and no safe levels – hello, tobacco. No safe level for that shit at all, not even for other people around the smoker. And that comes from the Cancer Council of Australia.
Agh, I feel old. 1989 I was 18
I’m not sure if Dale Carnegie said it, but it’s absolutely true.
And of course, you’re absolutely right about them not seeing women as full human beings. And because you know that, you already know more about Getlaidology than they ever will.
But here’s the funny thing, if you’re into black humor: the emotional bond that they don’t want isn’t always necessary, but even if they encountered a woman whose essential attitude is “Hi. Mind if I sit on your dick?”, they would probably scare her off anyway, if they didn’t ignore her entirely in their lust for an HB10.
*snrk*
“The surest way to get people interested in you is to be genuinely interested in them.”
PUA: “Alright, how do I act genuinely interested in them?”
My old visual art room had a backlog of 40 years of National Geographic. I assure you, I am very, very, very well informed about the changing climate status of our planet (And the various way this influences the pictures people take of lions).
No, I don’t know why the visual art room had a backlog of National Geographic.
There’s also always this neat XKCD! http://xkcd.com/1321/
Oh, and:
The important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made
It’s all about sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
And ninja’d within a couple of minutes.
Young whippersnapper, I was 26!
It’s a quarter century since the first time I was in London and Paris …
Mod note to Kevin K: you’re not on moderation, you were banned. Don’t waste your time trying to post.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an attempt to paste their faces onto younger stuntmen’s bodies via CGI (especially Hamill, if Luke is supposed to still be doing wild Jedi stunts).
I was 9 in 1989, but grew up near DC.
My very young classmates and I had “serious” (for precocious 7-9 year olds) discussions about how we’d fare. The consensus ended up being that we were far enough out that we’d have slow, fallout-induced deaths unless “they” also bombed Quantico – then we might be lucky and die in the initial blasts.
For awhile (and still in the back of my mind) I thought that it was only a matter of (short) time before there’d be a terrorist attack (suicide bomber, dirty or not) at the National Zoo.
It’s such a soft target – no scans, no bag searches – and has so many potential, overwhelmingly distracted casualties bunched in elbow to elbow, especially on holidays.
It’s so much fun walking around with that mindset.
/sarcasm
Unrelated side note: Tell me that rendering monstrosity doesn’t look like a shorn Nicolas Cage.
ermagerd
words fail
Having mods is fun, I always enjoy bulletins from the mod zone and hearing about the futile blocked posts of ragey trolls. (Note: I’m a terrible person.)
For those wondering: That’s a shot of a bug from WWE 2K14, and the wrestler with his head unfortunately tucked into his collarbone is Ryback (and don’t worry, he doesn’t look like that irl). The wrestler opposite him is Kane. [/WWE knowledge]
Well, there was the CGI de-aging they did to Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy… granted, in that case the Uncanny Valley drop actually made in-world sense anyway.
“Hey, babe, I bet you didn’t know you were sitting next to a Level 90 Fire Mage.”
Good thing *I’m* dating a Level 90 Frost Mage instead!
::terrible person high five::
😈
And I — was over 40. And yes, I do remember trudging off to the strange room we had at our primary school t(that was usually reserved for the boys woodwork and other arcane stuff) to watch movies about ducking beneath our desks / under a blanket to protect ourselves from fallout.
Being in South Australia, we had both nuclear bomb testing at Maralinga and the rocket range at Woomera. So most of the messages we got about this stuff were excited and positive in our news services. There were plenty of British service uniforms around at various times as well so the awareness never really went away.
The message changed as we got older though. Well, we got older and were less inclined to accept everything the way a 9 year old does. A lot of people involved in Vietnam protests had started off in general anti-nuclear, anti-war protests. Many of you wouldn’t know this but there were real, honest to dog suggestions from real people that we should use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Mainly as a side serve to nuking Moscow and Beijing, but still. Though there were also a lot of idiotic proposals about using nukes for mining and for rejigging landscapes and so on. All of them look downright weird now, but some people were quite serious about this shit.
I was a teenager during the early 80s, and I remember having awful, sweaty nightmares of nuclear holocaust at least once a week. Even now, I still occasionally have them. Reagan seemed like a grinning imbecile, a monkey at the helm making jocular jokes about the red button and the Evil Empire. He was a terrifying, heartless man. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d do with my last half hour of life if the Russians sent ICBMs. Would it be better to run towards ground zero and die immediately? Or seek shelter and probably asphyxiate from the fireball, or else suffer a slow and horrible death from radiation, or wander aimlessly around an ash-grey wasteland with no food and no sunlight?
The biggest thing that scarred me was The Day After. That scene where all the electrical devices and cars stop working suddenly because of the electromagnetic pulse from the initial detonations of missiles in the atmosphere…and then it pans back from the city…way back…way way back…and there’s an eerie quiet…
You never quite get over those images.
Growing up in Massachusetts, my brother used to have a standing bet every year with my mother that the pond down the street would have ice thick enough to skate on by Thanksgiving. He always won that bet.
These days, it’s January before ponds are skateable, and even then, the cycles of freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw make for very unpredictable outdoor skating.
I always hoped I’d be killed outright. I feared most for my cats – and it’s the thought of what happens to animals in such a conflagration that distresses me most.
Regarding dragon cats:
http://yukipri.tumblr.com/post/75639809417/baby-smaug-baby-dragons-are-essentially-winged
Once upon a time, women were held to be unsuited for scholarship. We lacked the manly powers of ratiocination and focus. And if by some unnatural fluke a woman was gifted with braininess unbecoming a laydee, she was cautioned that too much study would atrophy her uterus, rendering her sterile.
Nowadays, we’re told, sitting and reading is for pussies.
Christina Hoff Sommers (“in the golden days of yore, manchildren free-ranged about the classroom”) has a lot to answer for. She’s made intellectualism unmanly.
Ah gamergate, the gift that just keeps on projectile-vomiting-in-a-360-degree-arc. That op is hilarious. Especially the bit at the end: “we know the antis are reading this, and it only helps us!”
Uh… really dude? How exactly does that work? Didn’t you explicitly state this was an infiltration mission? Because I’m pretty sure most infiltration missions don’t start with “hey FYI, we’re sending a spy/saboteur over to spy on/sabotwise you guys”.
It’s amusing how they can present a face like that and *still* think they’ve got some sort of valid point. Nope. Normal people don’t try to convince others of their opinions via sabotage and infiltration, they just, y’know, present those opinions.
And yes, it really does seem like they don’t understand the way SJW’s (or really, anyone who isn’t them) works. Don’t they know you need at least 4 years of intense training before we let you into the upper echelons? And another 2 years from there before you can meet the Grand High Priest and be allowed to read the ancient truths directly from the pages of the Socialjusticomincon. I mean yeesh, how could we have infiltrated every level of
governmentgame journalism is we shared our secret plans with every arsehole who befriended us on twitter?Re : the cold war. It was assumed that Canada, being between the USA and USSR, would be a radioactive wasteland shortly after the first salvo. My cohorts in elementary school used to have long discussions about how horrible our lingering deaths would be. Good times!
Re: boys have to sit still in school. My son’s teacher has a stationary bike in the back of the class, and kids are allowed to work at stations she has set up throughout the class. Please don’t anyone fink on her to the FHC, as Young Master Grump adores her.