I thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
Categories
OH NO A SNAKE TORNADO: Twitter takes 5/2/20
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothI thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
I could have been happily left un-reminded that such a book cover exists, David!!
And how the hell does someone go “restrictions to reduce COVID-19 spread = Nazi concentration camps”? It’s almost as bad as the MRAs comparing men to slaves because, oh noes, women have more rights than they did a few decades ago.
@Surplus – I grant that this is annoying. What I don’t quite understand is why the lag in seeing new comments is a practical problem. When comments are rendered slightly “out of date” by replies that appear before them, the conversation is usually still coherent.
Buuuuut that’s easy for me to say….in this case. ADHD here, and I also have a tendency to get anxious about seemingly unimportant things* (just not this particular thing).
*Example! Once I spent about 2 hours tweeting about a weird error in a mini encyclopedia I found on my brother’s shelf. It was a seriously weird one though; the sentences in each entry seemed to be arranged in random order. My father speculated that maybe it was some software mistake during the layout. SO. FRIGGIN. WEIRD. (Though not terribly “important.”)
Since this is an open thread:
Humanity really likes to build up my faith in it, before tearing that down.
World of Warcraft is played with a keyboard and mouse in tandem. You can play with just one or the other, but it is inefficient. This means accessibility issues for some people who cannot physically use both or even cannot use either.
There are gamepad controllers designed for people with accessibility issues, but at this time WoW cannot be played with a gamepad unless you use third-party add-on programs that can be very finicky and hard to use.
So Blizzard (Wow’s developers) are finally adding optional controller support in the next expansion. It won’t be as efficient as keyboard-and-mouse play due to the nature of the game, but it will make the game available to a lot of people who physically could not play it before. The effect on keyboard-and-mouse play will be nonexistent, just like the “colorblind” option for the graphics.
This made me feel good… until I read what quite a few vocal players are saying about it. They are angry that Blizzard is “wasting development time” on a feature that won’t benefit them.
People are angry about the video game equivalent of an automated door button. It doesn’t affect them at all… and as far as I can tell this is WHY they’re angry – that Blizzard is daring to put time, effort, and money into people who are Not Them.
Draw any political conclusions from this that you like.
I keep seeing claims that some of these Nazi-inspired protest signs are photoshopped – but they can never agree which ones are the photoshopped ones are, or provide the alleged unaltered originals, so I am skeptical.
@Allandrel
This feels familiar. Whiny gamer bros think every feature must be about them. I wonder if they get similarly upset when a game adds more language options for languages they don’t speak.
What always baffles me about these kinds of gamers is: most games, especially MMO type games, are better the more people play them and you get a bigger community. Although I’m not a gamer, when it comes to my interests in other media like music or books I usually encourage more people to consume that media to expand the community. By being an asshole and opposing diversity/accessibility features, they are limiting the size of the community and their own experience. And that just seems counterintuitive. I mean, I know why bigots want to restrict their game to able-bodied white cishet men, but I just can’t relate.
@Diptych
The photoshop claims seem overblown—every time a terrorist is shown to have Trump/other right wing stickers or insignia conservatives like to claim it’s a photoshop job to try to dissociate themselves. It seems that here a similar thing is happening, in that they’re trying to save face by denying it.
Naglfar:
Oh, in spades!
It’s actually a ton of work to do. It’s something that easily falls to the wayside in a project. On the other hand, if you’re in Quebec, if your game comes out in French from the start you get a lot better tax credit. And you’ll obviously want to publish in English to get an international audience. So everyone does it who’s claiming tax credits.
@Naglfar
They seem to throw tantrums about ANYTHING that makes the game more approachable, such as:
Making the GUI more understandable, often by imitating third-party addons that the complainers themselves were using so that, for example, you know WHERE the specific bears whose asses you need to collect can be found. Games should be frustrating!
Making it so that high-level content is not locked behind twenty hours of grinding. Why should people who can’t treat the game as a second job be able to play the whole game?
Adding a matchmaker system for group content so that running a dungeon does not require that you find four other people with a specific mix of roles, and then spend twenty minutes traveling to the dungeon, but instead can queue up in a menu, get teleported to the dungeon, when return to where you were afterwords. Don’t they understand that standing in a city spamming trade chat and then walking for twenty minutes is the BEST part of the game?
@David:
To say Alex Jones has a warped view of his fellow humans would be like saying Anchorage can get a little cold during the winter.
@Naglfar:
The aforementioned “whiny gamer bros” are why I mostly stick to Facebook game apps. That and the fact my hand/eye coordination is atrocious.
Taking the time to de-lurk just to express the sentiment that gun-wielding Nazis, loudly protesting en-masse and mingling with each other seems to be a problem that might just take care of itself on its own. Then again, these irresponsible idiots will undoubtedly interact with other people in public places, so it’s nothing to be celebrated.
On the other hand, looks like we fucked up big time down here. I would pay good money for a reasonable explanation as to how on Earth we went from 71 to 45,000 infected after we declared one of the earliest quarantines in the region (if not the world) and stuck to that for 2 months.
Btw, spoiler alert, I’m still alive but that because I haven’t caught the Rona yet. Who knows, if I keep on taking the same precautions I am taking I might end up making it until the vaccine is ready (I was pre-diabetic the last time I checked but I was doing the whole treatment to reverse it).
World of Warcraft is fifteen years old. Maybe players should be happy it’s still getting support and development?
@Moggie : that being said, it’s a game with a monthly subscription, so continued development is expected.
Like if you rent a car, you expect the lending company to upkeep and/or replace it
The anti-game pad are mostly wankers, but I would point that part of their worry also come from the kerfuffle over Diablo, another of their game. Blizzard miscommunicated and shown a hugely watered down version of Diablo (for mobile gaming) as the new installment, which .. did not go well. Since then they have shown a better sequel in the works, but since that incident a lot of people fear that Blizzard would try to cut whatever they like in the game.
(a lot of word to say that often, far right wankers start from legitimate concerns and blow them out of proportion in addition to inject unhealthy doses of racism, classism and sexism)
@Chris O. : as a former facebook game developers, they have tons of toxic gamers, who in additions are the main income source. I would say to avoid forums about the games you play overall. If you think that kerfuffle about controller was bad, you’d better not see what emails the devs sometime get.
@Ohlmann
Oof, I remember my game dev email days. Not the best emails I ever got, let me tell you. I had to start going by the male-sounding short form of my name to get anything whatsoever done. Game dev is not kind to women programmers.
Although weirdly the thing I remember as being the most dehumanizing is when I was at a printers with a male coworker, who was there for other reasons than the technical specs of what we were doing, and the printer had an entire conversation with me about cmyk and rgb and what formats printed on what types of materials. But the whole time he refused to address me, and addressed only my male coworker, staring him dead in the eye, who was totally weirded out and trying to direct him back to me with things like, “You should probably talk to Big Titty Demon about that, she knows about that, right, Big Titty Demon?” It was like the printer would not acknowledge that the woman was the one with the technical knowledge, and was imagining my coworker was answering or something. Utterly dehumanizing. The company I worked for never used that printer again.
Although the casual abuse you can get by a friend accidentally letting slip you’re a woman on League of Legends used to run some stiff competition.
I once saw an add by a German charity where they showcased tons of accessibility technology for people with disabilities.
The tongue operated video game controller was seriously cool.
The language board a little girl was using had the vocabulary completely controlled by her and contained swear words, which had me very happy for her, because I know there are people out there who try to limit the expression of kids like her.
@Allandrel
This also reminds me of that time a bunch of them melted down about games having an easy mode.
@Knitting Cat Lady
The thing that frustrates me is how overpriced a lot of spelling board apps are. Many of the high quality ones cost hundreds of dollars. These are necessary for a lot of people to communicate and it’s just unethical to charge this much. I understand that maybe there’s a lot of effort into development or something, but even then it’s overpriced.
@Big Titty Demon : I was lucky on that front, even if the sentence “you’re skilled in programming for a girl” still give me murder impulse.
@Naglfar:
Yes, development costs for that sort of app would be huge.
This is why, in my opinion, they should be developed with public funding and free for the end user.
@Knitting Cat Lady
That would be a good idea. A society should provide for all its residents, and that definitely includes necessary services like language boards and other communications assistance devices.
There’s relatively little people interested in them, so they need to sell for a lot to recoup the development cost. Which can be an argument for public development indeed.
My theory on gamer bros is: gaming studios will sometimes give the appearance that they are changing or adding to a game based on popular demand (which may well be true, often as not). Blizzard definitely does this from time-to-time. Companies reacting to comsumer pressure should be just a fairly normal thing to do. But some gamers with no sense or proportion or perspective will notice this and decide that anything anyone say online about a game they like is now Very Important, as it could cause developers to change decisions about the game. So they will relentlessly stan stuff they like about a game, and completely lose their shit over they tiniest things they don’t like about a game. One can see this many places on the internet, but it seems particularly common with gamers.
@Surplus
It’s been explained to you multiple times. To paraphrase myself:
(The above usually works for seeing the edit link, too, for anyone having trouble with that.)
@Surplus
And as opposed to accepting it, you will do what?
@Allandrel
Well, that’s depressing :-/. I guess it’s nice that Blizzard is trying to make their game accessible to people who couldn’t use it? I guess?
A couple random things, since this is an open thread.
1. I found this over at the Patheos blog group, and figured folks here might want to consider if it’s likely to be true:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/kermitzarleyblog/2020/05/getting-trump-reelected-russia-and-china/
The tl:dr is that while Russia is (apparently) planning a bot barrage to get Trump re-elected because he’s useful to them, China is (apparently) planning a counterbot barrage to make Trump loose because he’s made them pretty mad over the covid-19 stuff.
If both of those statements are true, then this will be an…interesting 6 months to November. >.<
2. To pick up from a conversation from a few threads ago, can someone explain to me why and how making autistic people drink bleach to ‘cure’ them got started? Because I cannot see the logic behind this being considered a good idea by anyone.
I mean, I can see the ‘logic’ behind someone thinking the mechanical lubricant WD-40 would work on stiff elbow and knee joints, or see the ‘logic’ if someone tried to whiten their skin tone using bleach. But drinking something poisonous that’s made to be at a strength to clean off factory machines…what the hell?!?
The only thing worse is the fact that there’s evidently just enough official looking webpages out there to make the police and Social Services decline to interfere when these cases are brought to their attention because the parents ‘are practicing alternative medical treatments’ to cure their autistic children of their condition. (Maybe the folks pushing this as a treatment should drink a dose first in front of their patients, to prove it’s safe and effective?)
@Redsilkphoenix
I don’t know when it started initially, but I do know that the most common name for it, Miracle Mineral Supplement (used because it sounds better than “feeding kids bleach”), was coined in 2006 in a book by Jim Humble, an ex-scientologist.
The main justifications I’ve heard have been woo-y crap about “toxins” and the standard garbage pseudoscience. I think (but am not sure) that their thought process is that they think autism is caused by toxins, and that bleach is good for cleaning, so bleach could treat it (quite similar to Trump’s inject bleach plan).
Part of why I’m so annoyed about Trump’s bleach thing is that it empowers a lot of these people.
I’d like to see Trump do the same with his proposed COVID-19 treatment.
Isn’t it mostly bleach enemas, not drinking bleach, that is the trend there?
I doubt parents would get away with this if they were using this “treatment” on neurotypical children. It’s straight-up ableism, not only in the drive to cure autism, but in the inaction of authorities when faced with this kind of medical abuse. Take a neurotypical, straight-A student and give him a bleach enema, and see how quickly people move to put a stop to it.
@PoM
Oh, of course. Bleach isn’t the worst of it, either. Parents have murdered their autistic children and gotten off without jail time. And others have openly ruminated in front of their children about murdering them.