It is with heavy heart that I bring you this news: Reaxxion, the dopey video game site that racist skeezeball PUA and rape legalization proponent Roosh V set up at the height of #Gamergate, has been shut down.
Wait, did I say “with heavy heart?” I meant AH HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Anyhoo, so earlier today, Roosh broke the heart of dozens of readers by announcing that Reaxxion, his opportunistic and ill-concieved attempt to cash in on #Gamergate, would be no more.
I’ve decided to close Reaxxion after approximately nine months of operation. Traffic has not grown to a level that allows the site to financially sustain itself. We have not been able to consistently surpass 250,000 page views a month.
I take full blame for the site’s commercial failure. The writers and editor did a great job trying to achieve my vision of what Reaxxion should be, but in spite of that, the growth did not occur. I attribute this failure to creating the site from a spontaneous idea (in response to gamergate) instead of developing it organically based on an actual need. The fact the gamergate continues to be successful and influential in other communities shows that I did not even provide a substantial need to the audience it was intended for.
(Emphasis mine.)
Setting aside Roosh’s painfully inept writing — you don’t provide needs, you repugnant doofus, you fill them — I will grant him a few points for at least admitting his failure here; others in the extended manosphere, well, let’s jsut say they aren’t so good at this.
The “editor” in question is the lovely and talented Matt Forney; the loss of this “job” will presumably enable him to spend more time with his family stewing in his own rancid juices.
If Forney or any of the site’s writers were actually getting paid for this, it’s possible that Roosh lost a not-insignificant amount of money on this attempted cash-grab. (The amount of ad revenue you get for 250k views a month is pretty tiny.) The cloud to this silver lining is that the money Roosh may have lost would have mostly been going to people as shitty as he is.
Let’s look back at some of Reaxxion’s coverage of, er, video games, from the last few months to see what we’ll be missing:
Come to think of it, I think I will miss them!
H/T — @tauriqmoosa, for the tip!
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@EJ (The Other One)
True. Gamegate does contradict itself in that way, talking about how they “just wanna talk about video games” while not actually doing that. If GG was just a site (or something similar) that was dedicated to focus on video games as entertainment only and not the political, cultural, social part of it, that would be fine, maybe a bit simple-minded, but fine. Instead we got hate-movement 101 going on. Yay? euugh.
I did think it interesting, reading the comments under Reaxxion’s farewell, that most of them complained about the endless articles about SJWs.
Reaxxion was supposed to be a space free of the supposed ‘SJW agenda’ that would talk about macho friendly games, not a space for hearing endless carping about the very subjects these gamers would rather ignore.
It was very much like a MGTOW site, where the only subject is the women they’re avoiding but can’t stop thinking about.
@EJ (The Other One)
Wait , wait, wait. I though the Gaters’ whole defense of Milo was essentially based around “Sure, he called us basement-dwelling losers just weeks before the Quinspiracy started and sure he has implied that games are causing you to kill people, but it’s okay now, he has totally played, like, games and stuff!”
Are you saying that this is actually not true and the Gaters were *gasp* lying?!?
Also I thought that was the whole idea behind him changing his Twitter avatars to Nero, you know cause he suddenly started appreciating gaming. Am I to believe he instead simply googled “Game character with white hair” (presumably cause “Game character with mop on head” didn’t yield any results) and copied the first one he found?
@lurker:
We’d have to ask him, wouldn’t we? I’m sure Yiannopoulos would never stoop to rewriting his own past opinions in order to suit his present objectives.
(I don’t know the story of Yiannopoulos’s twitter avatar. Better minds than I should probably be consulted.)
My phone won’t embed images for some reason so I have to link to the whole story, but here’s some ridiculously adorable brain bleach.
http://io9.com/an-orphaned-wallaby-gets-comfort-from-his-teddy-bear-1722184877
lurker, remember that gators embraced Jack Thompson. Jack Thompson. If they could turn him into “Based Dad”, accepting Yiannopoulos as one of their own would be a breeze.
What happened here is that the thing that’s always been true forced it’s way out:
Gamergate is tiny. Very loud, but tiny. It also lacked any real activism too. Blogging, while an important part of modern activism, can’t carry anything on it’s own. It’s at best a light. And shining a light on people trying their best to improve problems of diversity isn’t ever going to build the populist outrage they imagined they had.
@ikanreed
One thing i’ve noticed is that while a lot of people have been talking about stuff GGers hate (like diversity in games, games that aren’t shooty bang bang etc) in public, like on GDC or those ted things, i’ve never heard about any major GG public talks about, well, GG stuff. They mostly seem to keep their presences on the internet and no where else. A movement that does that is bound to fail eventually.
I love the fact that Leia becomes an active participant in her own rescue. I could wish for a more active role for her in the rest of the movie, but the other two films don’t disappoint in that way. I hope she’s got plenty to do in Ep 7!
The Jack Thompson thing still blows my mind. So much of GG, and in fact The Sarkeesian Effect, seems to be driven by the fear of Jack Thompson, that I have no idea how they teamed up with him. Maybe they remember the anti-gaming demogoguery of the 90s but somehow failed to notice that Jack Thompson was involved?
I watched part of the Aurini cut of The Sarkeesian Effect. They repeatedly insinuated that Anita was grandstanding to the non-gaming public to make gamers look bad, which is… just not what she was doing. They didn’t make it her thesis, or say it explicitly, and I suppose technically they only said that she did make gamers look bad, not that she did it on purpose.
Still, when they respond to specific segments of her videos, they often say something about how a non-gamer wouldn’t understand the context or someone who doesn’t know video games would be misled by her examples. For example, she uses the game Hitman to talk about the disposability of female background characters. She illustrates this by showing a let’s play in which the player had made a giant pile of dead strippers. Tubman & Skull don’t address the sexism at all; they complain that the video might make people who don’t play games think gamers are violent people.
Re: Star Wars
A bearded religious fundamentalist hiding out in the desert radicalises a naïve young farm boy and recruits him to undertake a potential suicide mission to fly into and blow up a large infrastructure.
What sort of message is that to send to kids?
I’m not a gamer — I played Pacman at a pizza joint when it first came out in the early 80’s, and that’s it — and I know bufkus about games except what I’ve read here. My view of Gamergate was just another bunch of immature guys raising a stink about the women they’d like to fuck but don’t want anything else to do with. But these comments about how the gamergaters accepted Yiannopoulos, and ever more, the way they accepted Jack Thompson, reminded me of the way that the Tea Partiers are accepting Donald Trump despite his long track record of supporting fairly liberal causes in the past. For instance he was (and possibly still is) pro-choice. Perhaps the right-wing mindset is “good, he finally saw the light” rather than “shit, this bastard is just playing us for his own benefit.”
Right wing Americans are famously happy to accept converts; it’s thought to be a holdover from born-again Christianity’s emphasis on the possibility of conversion and of the extra status gained from having been a vile foe before one’s conversion. Right wing Europeans far less so, because in Europe the right is less associated with evangelical movements and more with insular identity groups. This being the case I wouldn’t draw any parallels between GG and the Tea Party where it comes to accepting unlikely allies.
I suspect in GG’s case it’s more a combination of the case that they’re willing to work with the devil in order to hurt the evil SJWs, and the fact that many GGers are simply too young or too politically ignorant to remember who Jack Thompson was.
Meant to include: It’s amazing how completely they don’t understand Tropes vs. Women. It’s not a video for people who don’t play games. It’s just… not. It has been purely inside baseball from the start.
Don’t think anyone is “accepting” Jack Thompson, they wanted to get someone they perceive as a villain to point at Anita and go “WOW that’s fucked up!” because somehow that’s some logical argument. I’ve seen a few complaints about Jack being included in the Sarkessian Effect.
For those that are familiar with the mind of Jordan Owen, this is typical of his “logic”. It’s as logical as interviewing Tipper Gore on Sarkeesian’s earrings.
They have not accepted Jack Thomspon and there are comparisons floating around about statements they have both made, trying to “prove” that Anita is for censorship. More Jordan Owen logic. He also interviewed his friend, the adult cam worker on her opinions, and she stated she is pretty sure that Anita is for censorship. OK… um…interesting. What a great documentary.
And the clips of Anita/Dines/Anita talking in tandem is supposed to link Anita to censorship as well. But when “Name” said that she believes that Anita is for censorship, that just sealed it for me. They really made their case.
I was a writer for the site, in hoping for a chance to get compensated for writing about games. However, they had a policy of making sure you write 4 articles before you get a chance to be a weekly contributor. The moment I got my 4th article confirmed and asked about the chance to get money for writing on the site, I was told the site was closing down.
I’m still very bitter about that.
Re: Milo
Yeah, I know nothing about it really makes sense, I was mostly joking.
Can’t say I am necessarily surprised that they accepted him without him having even done even the smallest “work” (playing one single game, I mean seriously) in order to redeem himself, cause yeah, like you said, Jack Thompson.
It does fit with the usual Gator MO, where something doesn’t actually need to be true, you just need to repeat it loud and long enough for it to become truth (see also #Not YourShield and the GG “Anti-Harassement” group).
As for Jack Thompson, I think his inclusion was the most obvious sign in a long time that GG is really about being anti-feminist and anti-progressiveness in general rather than the nebulous ethics in games journalism bullshit.
His name was literally their battle cry (as in “The reason we need to drive Anita and her friends out of the industry is cause they are basically the next Jack Thompson”), yet when they saw the chance of having someone with name-recognition – good or bad, although in this case bad – shot on feminism, they pounced on it.
Hmmm…
I think the word “that” is supposed to be something else? Or maybe all two-breasted mammals used to have one breast, until SJWs started hating the concept of boobs, and then – pop! – everybody got an extra boob.
People say hate isn’t the answer, but hate makes you grow breasts! I mean, what’s not to love?
The writer answered his own question in the first sentence. I guess I can’t accuse him of being a journalistic tease.
What does this portend? How do we read the signs?! Well, I’m glad there’s an expert at candycrushomagy here, since I only read tea leaves! (Mine right now says “ginger peach.” Oh wait, that’s the label on the tea bag. Carry on.)
@tinyorc:
Yeah, that’s why I’m so sad that it’s now impossible for me to really read comments on most of the websites I frequented. Doesn’t really matter where I go, there’s always going to be some #gibbon leaping off the walls in paranoid fury, because they need to be the sole audience for everything ever and anyone else who doesn’t conform to their demographic or doesn’t agree that their demographic should be the only one needs to go ahead and stop existing.
It makes me tired, and it makes me sad to think that a lot of these people are somehow around my age. They were raised in a very similar manner as I was and we share a lot of interests, yet somehow they managed to get these repugnant views on the world that have turned them into such morally reprehensible people that they either don’t realize or straight up don’t care that what they’re doing is so evil.
@Alan Robertshaw
The bearded religious fundamentalist recruits the naive young farm boy in the hopes of turning him into an agent to confront and assassinate the head of state.
Flying into the large infrastructure, and subsequently blowing it up, were never in his plans.
And anyway “flying through the superstructure to destroy the main reactor so the whole thing blows up” is the third movie.
I swear. These Fake Geek Boys.
@ Falconer
Bollocks; I’m rumbled.
But as Doctor Spock from Star Gate once said “If at first you don’t succeed, there is no try”.
You just made my day, Alan. And there was plenty in the “shoulda stood in bed today” column.
“Meant to include: It’s amazing how completely they don’t understand Tropes vs. Women. It’s not a video for people who don’t play games. It’s just… not. It has been purely inside baseball from the start.”
CMIIW, but hasn’t Anita stated that she would like her videos to be taught in schools?
Ah thanks – I didn’t know about that one. I’m kinda surprised that there’s a GG-inspired site which is well-designed AND functional AND still being updated, though the updates seem to be just a smattering of grievances about a handful of games journalists (I guess that’s actually most of what the site is overall). Really, it’s kind of amazing just how petty or nonsensical most of the ‘corruption’ allegations leveled by GG actually are/were.
Yeah, the whole story with Intel is pretty hilarious. My understanding: Intel quickly caved to GG after a targeted email campaign, assuming (probably) that GG represented a potentially-significant chunk of their consumer base. After learning more about what GG actually was, and after seeing how GG was using Intel’s caving as an example of the MIGHTY POWER of GG, Intel not only reinstated ads on Gamasutra, but also started a $300 million ‘diversity’ campaign which involved partnering with a bunch of progressive organizations, including Feminist Frequency. It was very much a Pyrrhic victory for GG. You can even read an angry article about it on, um, Reaxxion!
From what I’ve seen, it’s less that Anita said it (in fact, she didn’t say it at all), but rather another GG rumor about her that states that women have barged into classes and demanded that her videos be taught.
So, it’s another way for GG to point at Anita and say that she’s a Totalitarian Femmcommunazi who’s hell-bent on making games that she likes and destroying all others.