Ah ha ha ha ha ha! The Sarkeesian Effect duo have split up again! It’s a Fourth of July Miracle!
So today, a furious Jordan Owen put out a video denouncing his now ex-partner Davis Aurini. Why? Because Aurini is demanding another $15,000 to edit the “film” and has set up a fundraiser without Owen in order to raise it.
According to Owen, Aurini has been “dicking around” with the footage for months in hopes of squeezing more money out of the project’s backers. Owen is having none of it, and is telling the backers not to give Aurini another cent, saying that he (Owen) will be editing the footage himself and putting out the film on schedule.
Also, the alleged “big reveal” that was going to come out in the “film?” According to Owen, Aurini decided based on watching one of Sarkeesian’s videos that she had been raped by her father, and was evidently shopping around to find a therapist who would agree to say as much on camera. Aurini’s completely unqualified internet diagnosis: that was their big reveal.
Just watch the video. It’s delicious.
And here, below, is Aurini’s fundraising video, which is what Owen is reacting to. Aurini’s unctuous, earnest tone is especially hilarious in the wake of Owen’s denunciations. Also his repeated references to “we,” as if Owen is on board with him.
At one point he assures would-be backers that he’s “streamlined” his life so he can work on the editing of The Sarkeesian Effect full-time. “As well as writing and doing Youtube videos, which I regularly do,” he adds. “And the podcast.”
Also he needs to do more filming.
He’s evidently hoping to keep the gravy train going until September.
Apparently he’s been so busy with the full-time editing (and writing and doing Youtube videos, which he regularly does, and the podcast) that he’s forgotten to shave his head.
And he seems to have fired his skull.
H/T — @srhbutts
If I wasn’t against the idea of giving them money, I would want to make this hilarious film a huge success. Not because it’s good, but because it’s bad. Make this the next Plan 9 from Outer Space. We could have viewing parties of the Sarkeesian effect where we can sit in bathtubs and bring skulls!
Hoosier X, thanks for the link to IMDB. At the bottom of the page is a “More Like This” section. The first movie listed is “Poultrygeist”. Heh.
Paradoxical Intention:
You’re giving me flashbacks to when gamergate started…There was a lot more to the “‘Gamers’ are over” article. There was no “death” and or “dead” anywhere in it. You have no idea how many people twisted that into saying that Alexander wanted gamers to all die, or wished they were dead or something. They were deeply insulted by stuff that wasn’t even in the article. And the article itself was to the gaming industry, saying that gaming has moved beyond the stereotypical “gamer” and they don’t have to make games just for them. Heck, the title is even “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.”
And the industry wasn’t focusing on “people who live and breathe games” in the general sense, they were focusing on the stereotypical “gamer.”
@ Tessa:
Well, she was wrong. Those same stereotypical gamers aren’t dead, just dying, and she just showed them the guy in the sensible suit is a Matrix Agent, and in Zion they aren’t that important.
That’s what pissed them off so much. Blue pills up the gills.
HOLY CRUD IT’S THEM
WE ARE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS PEOPLE
http://www.kipbot.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_0015.PNG
http://www.mystjourney.com/img/screenshots/myst-05.jpg
Tessa-
What you said. The point of that article was an inside-industry article (the publication it was for was designed around a game designer audience) about how the toxic culture that presumed a narrow demographic of douchebros for all potential titles was ignoring this massive audience of people who enjoy games.
And this is plain to see for anyone who has been paying attention to gaming. For the last while now, grimdark 90s comics-esque “mature” titles about violence and titties or brown-grey first-person shooters brightly saluting to the American flag have been utterly dominating the landscape much to the harm of gaming as an industry.
Not only because it has lead to a particularly toxic strain of douchebro gamers who decide that because they are the most frequently pandered to subset of gaming, that they must in fact be the only “real” gamers out there and therefore feeling justified to grow more and more hostile to things like the presence of women in games, the existence of diverse games or games for children (ask comics fans if pushing out children from comics worked well for them in the 90s), or even innovation in general. As such, there has been a constant narrowing of target audience and constant competition for said narrow subset of the market which has lead to the death of a lot of studios and an arms race where all the companies try and deliver their greys and browns with even more expensive animation than the last company at the expense of gameplay and diversity.
And it’s also lead to some of gaming’s biggest liabilities. Whether it be the noxious XBox Live, the culture of casual harassment in general, the many varied problems in gaming journalism where gaming journalists are expected to be unquestioning mouthpieces and advertising methods of the big studios, the stereotypical gamer image of a foul-mouthed poorly-socialized misogynist racist teenager who’s lazy and addicted to fast food, or the parade of games with lots of problematic content that gets media airplay and forces the industry to rally behind them.
On top of that, the narrowed audience ignores that massive amount who play video games that people have noted when trying to narrowly define “gamers”. Women are about half of the potential audience for games but rarely are shown in media. Ditto for race and sexuality. Similarly different experiences or play styles are often shut out entirely as all the game companies have chased after the 3 Cs (Candy Crush, Call of Duty, Clash of Clans) and so have left huge segments of the market untouched and hungry for media that speaks to them and this has lead to some off-the-wall properties who ignore those rules of who is “supposed to be a gamer” suddenly cleaning up much to the dismay of “twue gamers” (Gone Home, Splatoon, Papers Please, and so on).
Leigh’s article was about how gaming companies harm themselves trying to chase after a fictional tiny market of “hardcore” fans and that they no longer need to base their business models on that stereotype but can feel financially secure going after a wider audience or even a nontypical audience because frankly its true that the label “gamers” now applies to most people on the planet.
And the sad thing is that so many are so invested in the narrow toxic masculinity carousel of using the narrow focus of gaming to justify feeling special that we forget that that was the point of so many years of pushback against the idea that video games were bad and toxic and warping our minds and turning us into little devil worshippers. That one day in the future it would become so ubiquitous that it was no longer something to get beaten up over, but something everyone does and which can be so casually pervasive a mainsteam disney movie can use its concepts as a conceit and not worry about losing the audience. That we could share video games with loved ones, children, parents, coworkers without it being odd or a sign of a stunted childhood. That the stereotypes were wrong and the industry could be big enough to truly allow a dizzying array of diversity.
But instead we’re locked by the sad little gatekeepers who want to make gaming a tool of toxic masculinity, a narrowly supported subdiscipline where they can happily fulfill those toxic stereotypes but hey, they can look down at all those filthy casuals and thus feel “better?” about themselves. Who are having a massive tantrum because now gaming really is about everyone so maybe there will be one game in a thousand that doesn’t even think about them in development or is for women or for queer youth or that references themes they don’t care about or that the person playing with them might not also be an angry 40-something racist sexist man-baby, but a kid or a woman or just not a complete shit.
And they are screaming and pounding their shoe over the unfairness of it all. But the reality is what Leigh said in yet another no shit article pounced on by disingenuous fucks trying to look neutral between a harassment campaign and its victims, that that narrow toxic band harming our medium do not have to be what we cater to as an industry.
That we should no longer have to view an entitled minority of individuals who think that harassment, doxing, and death threats are common currency for any developer who dares step out of their violent ideas of what a line is (what happened to Dragon Age II’s developer, anyone?), but can target that wide variety of human spectrum that is coming now to enjoy gaming because gaming has made it.
And you know what, she’s fucking right. And hopefully this massive harassment campaign has really waved the flag for the industry to see just how toxic this entitled pile of shit has become and how necessary it is for the industry to stop making them the sole and only focus of its marketing machine.
shsjohnv-
Ok three things:
1) Leigh Alexander never once used the word dead anywhere in her article title. I mean, if you’re going to manufacture a whole artificial outrage campaign over some meaningless little article daring to note an opinion you don’t like and which somehow shows that gamers are the true aggrieved minority, you could at least USE ONE THAT ACTUALLY SAYS WHAT YOU CLAIM. Fuck, you don’t even need to read the article to disprove this lie. It’s on the fucking title that appears whenever you link it. Fuck Paradoxical Intention’s initial link says when you hover over it that it’s “Gamers are Over”, not Gamers are Dead.
2) Even if it did say “dead”. So what? The outrage machine that has retroactively seize on that article to obfuscate the origins of their harassment machine against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian wouldn’t have a point even if they had that fucking point. So what someone said you were dead in a title?
Why should anyone care? That people said your movement was donezo and over? This is supposed to counter and justify death threats, driving people from their homes, and the coordinated attempt to use terrorism and violence to drive women both cis and trans out of gaming in service to a particularly toxic masculinity.
This is Catholic Vote level WTF here. How exactly are we supposed to take this “tough gamer” image seriously when they are reacting like a mean article (that isn’t even a mean article and was in fact rather measured seeing as how it was reporting on a toxicity that had already cost the careers of close friends of hers) as if they were shot with a super powered death gun of extra pain. Male entitled gamer shits are not an aggrieved minority. They are a poison on a hobby I love that has prevented it from growing all in service to trying to make gaming a non-athletic “male activity” insecure guys can use to feel “better” about themselves.
And if they ever want the stereotype of “gamers” to go away, they need to let it instead of screaming their fool heads off anytime anyone tries to point out how diverse the industry and audience have become or anyone tries to create a genuine arts criticism culture like what helped movies grow into their own.
3) I may be off, but given all the Matrix metaphors, I doubt it.
As such, allow me to remind you that the creators of this beloved franchise that has impacted you so much that 16 years later it is your central metaphor are two very strong feminists and that one of them is a transwoman who has often spoken against the exact type of toxic masculinity MRAs and gamergaters trade in.
The creators of your touchstone do not respect you. They never will.
Someone on Twitter linked to Aurini being interviewed tonight on a show called “Skeptics and Believers.” I’ve only listened to a few minutes at the end where he objects, among other things, to being called a “fedora” because that’s an insult to atheists, and that’s like calling someone the wrong racial slur. Apparently it’s just bad manners to use the wrong epithet when insulting a member of a specific group.
Oh, his skull is a memento mori, “You pig-ignorant savages.”
https://youtu.be/GTt46j95qo4
I can’t remember ever listening to an asshole this pretentious. And I’ve taken courses in the literary criticism of Jacques Derrida.
“Blue pills up the gills.”
That’s almost a koan. I’ll try meditating to it tonight.
Cerberus,
To all your posts
http://www.thepoke.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/applause-3.gif
Wat?
As an atheist, I can say I’ve never looked at “fedora” as an anti-atheist slur. That doesn’t even make sense. Not that I expect dollar store Lavey to make sense.
wwth, the fedora comment was one of the more… [searches for a word, throws out “comprehensible” and “logical,” discards “logical” and “rational” with a snort, settles for…] coherent things he’s said in the bits I’ve heard.
I’m very pro-fedora. I love fedoras and am upset they’ve been co-opted by…whomever. I don’t want to tag the wrong group and incur Aurini’s disapproval. But fedoras should be a protected class of headgear.
And OMG, his closing comments! He vividly describes drawing and quartering as the appropriate way to deal with SJWs.
Now I have to go back and listen from the beginning. From comments, I expect to hear a lot of droning about his theories on the art of cinema.
Slightly off topic here but I found the WHTM steam group and was wondering how I can join?
Heh, they’re at it again… this trainwreck just gets even more hilarious with each article. xD
Also, to comment on the whole “gamer” term, as a gamer who’s been sick and tired of GG’s bullshit ever since it started:
As said above, I consider myself a “gamer”. I spend a lot of time playing games, reading, writing and drawing about games, and have an interest in the media form of video games in general. And I don’t see anything wrong in having specific terms for hobbies and interests you like and feel are important to you. While games are certainly not my entire personality or the most “important” part of my identity, and I do have other interests, video games have for years been an important hobby of mine that I’ve felt really close to. So in that way, I kind of consider my game interest a “part of me” just like I do with my other hobbies and interests.
Sure, everyone plays games nowadays, so because of this, some people claim there’s no need for the term (and I get it, because it’s just “interest + er”, it kind of sounds like a generic term for everyone who does this thing that almost everyone does nowadays). But for some, it’s a more “important” interest than others – rather than just playing some or other game now and then, they typically are passionate about games and like “video games” as a medium. And we do have terms for people very interested in movies and books, so what makes games so different? For comparision, I also watch movies, like most other people. I like a whole lot of different movies. However, “movies” as a form of media by themselves is not something I’m interested in to the same extent, so I see no need for or interest in calling myself a “cinephile” or “movie buff” or something.
HOWEVER – and this is the important part – whether you’re “interested enough” or “a real gamer” is not something someone else can decide, or tell you that you “don’t belong because such and such”. If you consider yourself to like games enough to call yourself a gamer, then that’s what you are, even if all you play is Angry Birds and Candy Crush (though I can’t say I have really seen many self-proclaimed gamers like this). There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to be a gamer, all you need to do is to like video games (of any kind!) and consider yourself one. And I certainly don’t feel “threatened” upon seeing people like this join the “group”, or seeing many different kinds of games existing, even when they are games I certainly wouldn’t play myself. (On the same note, even if you’ve loved games all your life and spend a lot of time playing them, but don’t want to call yourself a “gamer” for whatever reason, that’s fine too! Labels like these are only for the people who want to use them.)
So yeah, I fully understand why some people don’t like the term (especially after last year), and I certainly don’t have much in common with (or really much respect for) the stereotypical “gamer”, but as a term for “someone who loves video games”, I’m fine with it and see a “point” in it. So, just my opinion I guess
@Cerberus:
Um, did you read what I actually said?
I was saying the GATERS were taking the blue pills. And yes, there was a bit of ironic mocking that a film meant to quietly satirize WASP power through Gnosticism is usually twisted by the very people it was criticising.
Geez man, check if you’re pointing your gun at your own side or not!
Reading it again, yeah I should have made it a little clearer I was talking about the Gaters.
But still, I don’t like being the windmill.
“this is gonna be a short video”
/me looks at length — 11 minutes and change
When I asked for a content warning on these chuckleheads’ videos, this wasn’t what I was thinking … but it _does_ set the tone well.
Coming from a trilby* who uses the n-word with a relish, that’s downright rich.
*because most Menz Rightzers who think they’re wearing fedoras (as a shortcut to being Interesting Men of Character), are actually wearing the fedora’s douchey little small-brimmed cousin, the trilby.
Shit, people who organize themselves around a thinly-veiled premise of hating women and duplicitous conspiracy theories turned out to be cannibalistic assholes? It’s almost like you’d have to a habitually dishonest paranoid with a notable difficulty at exercising reason and good judgement to believe in their basic pitch.
Also, I miss the skull. 🙁
@ April
So do I. It was the least thick individual in this entire song and dance.
Probably why it was fired, actually.
shsjohnv-
Sorry. I’m just on a little bit of a hair trigger on the gamergate fucks cause they’ve targeted some close friends of mine. I should’ve asked for clarification before going off though.
@ Cerberus
I know how you feel. Seems that the only people who invoke the Matrix don’t actually understand it. At all.
You could say they are never following the White Rabbit.
That pair is ripe material for a very dark sitcom/soap opera.
With skulls.
The 2nd video gets better the longer you watch it. Like, the amount of douche on display. Holy shit.