My little game collection. Yes, I’m a terrible photographer.
Ever since the bizarre social backlash now known as #GamerGate first erupted in August, we’ve heard a lot of alarmist, entitled nonsense from self-described gamers who are pig-biting mad that so-called Social Justice Warriors and, you know, girls, are invading what is inevitably described as “our hobby.”
Thing is, guys, it’s not your hobby. At least it’s not only yours.
I don’t call myself a “gamer” – largely because so many of those who do embrace the label are such immature assholes – but, guess what, I play games too.
So last night I discovered the PunchableFaces subreddit. That’s right, an entire subreddit devoted to posting pictures of people so that Redditors can fantasize about doing them bodily harm.
While most of the pictures in the subreddit are of boys and men – some targeted for being “faggots” – the recent posts (as of this writing) with the greatest number of upvotes and comments were, naturally, aimed at women. Specifically, at two outspoken feminists who’ve been singled out by Men’s Rights Activists and #GamerGaters for endless harassment: video game critic Anita Sarkeesian and Canadian feminist activist Chanty Binx, perhaps better known amongst her enemies as “Big Red.”
Christina Hoff Sommers is an old school faux-feminist who’s devoted the last several decades to trashing feminism. Lately she’s apparently decided to appeal to a younger audience — or at least a more immature one — by pandering to the #GamerGate crowd.
That’s probably worth a post or two in itself, but in the meantime you might enjoy this excellent song that deftly rebuts the, er, arguments in her recent video about sexism in video games and why she thinks that’s somehow not a real issue because, you know, dudes like to look at boobies when they play games. No, that’s really her argument — though I’m not sure it even qualifies as an argument, technically speaking.
Anyway, enjoy!
And here’s her original video, if you’re feeling masochistic and would actually enjoy sitting through six and a half very long minutes of simple-minded, patronizing, disingenuous, evidence-free pseudoarguments delivered by someone desperately pandering to terrible, terrible people.
This gif makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen Galaxy Quest
#GamerGate and Men’s Rights: two terrible tastes that taste terribler together.
Ok, maybe that slogan needs a bit of work. But it’s true that when you combine the poor-oppressed-me-we-hate-AnitaZoe-Sarquinneesian narrative of the #GamerGaters with the poor-oppressed-me-feminazis-rule-the-world narrative of the Men’s Righsters you get some amazing outbursts of indignant self-dramatizing self-pity.
Take, for example, this melodramatic email sent by A Voice for Men’s “operations manager” Dean Esmay to … a grocery chain that advertises on the game site Kotaku, a bete noire of the #GamerGate movement. I’ve highlighted some of the Esmay-ist bits:
[NOTE: The original video on Davis Aurini’s YouTube channel was taken down shortly after the post went up. So I’ve embedded the version that is, as of this moment, up on the director’s YouTube channel. I”d recommend that you download this for your permanent collection.]
Ok, so I’ve been working on a post about the latest ridiculous doings of our friends Davis Aurini and JordanOwen42 — the not-so-dynamic duo who’ve been desperately begging for money to make their Totally Serious documentary about how evil Anita Sarkeesian is. But then I watched this, and it’s too good not to post on its own.
This is Lust in the Time of Heartache, a short “philosophical” film written and produced, and just posted on teh Interwebs, by Mr. Aurini. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be a comedy, but I was laughing at it from beginning to end.
There’s nothing about this film that’s not terrible and ridiculous, from the choice of fonts in the title sequence to the names of the characters as revealed in the closing credits.
Where even to start in criticizing this mess? The, er, “acting?” The pretentious, pseudo-philosophical voiceover, delivered by Mr. Aurini himself? The shrill, frantic — yet somehow also meandering — music that plays almost continuously from beginning to end? The ludicrously unconvincing fight choreography? The ill-fitting suits? The evo psych? The dawning recognition that this whole thing is meant to depict how Aurini sees himself in our “fallen” world?
The fact that this ten minute film credits a “parkour consultant?”
I’m going to borrow a couple of lines from Pauline Kael’s famous review of the legendarily stinky 1970 film Song of Norway because they offer a pretty fair assessment of this one as well:
The movie is of an unbelievable badness. … You can’t get angry at something this stupefying; it seems to have been made by trolls.
She means “under the bridge”-style trolls, not the modern kind.
Oh, and the sound is awful, too. NOTE: Dialogue is supposed to be louder than the background noises.
Anyway, just watch it. It’s only ten minutes long. And definitely stay for the final credits. You’ll see why.
But hey, don’t take my word for it. Read this glowing review, from some dude on YouTube:
Excellent writing that encompasses the transitions from one cinematic style to the next. At first I was concentrating on the technical problems and lackluster performances, however, after about 5 mins in, the pacing kicked up a notch. Well done, sir.
The long wait is over! #GamerGate Bingo is here! Well, here, actually. Go there for your very own randomly generated bingo card, and get playing!
Also, I can edit the list of phrases that’s being used to make the cards, so if you have ideas for new phrases, or you want to improve the wording of one that’s already there, or you think one of them should be removed for being redundant or too obscure or too obvious or whatever, let me know in the comments!
A little realization hit me while I was watching videos about #GamerGate recently. MRAs and #GamerGaters really seem to enjoy depicting themselves as cartoon villains. Above, the skull-in-a-Koolaid-pitcher mascot of MRA videoblogger Bane666au.
Below, a screencap from a video by Mundane Matt, one of the movers and shakers behind the whole #GamerGate thing.
[CORRECTION: See the section on sockpuppeting for a correction.]
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
If you’re looking for evidence of just how carefully – and how duplicitously – the campaign of vilification and harassment now known as #GamerGate was planned, from the very beginning, there’s perhaps no better place to find it than in the chat log from the IRC channel #burgersandfries.
The channel, launched when the Zoe Quinn “scandal” first erupted in August, has served as a virtual meeting place for hundreds of 4channers trying to dig up dirt on Quinn and her supporters and spread this information/disinformation as widely as possible.
Today I would like to focus on some of the dirty tricks that 4channers and others on the channel have been using in their attempts to ruin the life and careers of Quinn and her supporters, tricks that were discussed surprisingly openly.
The tricks I’ll focus on today are spamming, doxxing, and sockpuppeting – including impersonating women/people of color in order to make the #GamerGate movement seem less obviously a white male-dominated reaction to outspoken women in video games.
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
A couple of days ago, embattled indie game designer Zoe Quinn embarrassed some of her biggest critics by posting screenshots she’d collected from a 4channer IRC channel, showing an assortment of hateful and duplicitous #GamerGaters literally conspiring to wreck her reputation and create the illusion of a vast grassroots uprising against alleged corruption in the gaming business.
Her critics, put on the defensive, tried their best to dismiss her screenshots as “cherry picked,” and a few even accused her of writing the very messages she screenshotted and posted. Oh, there might be a few bad apples in the bunch, some were willing to concede, but they were in the minority.
And then they pulled out what they thought was their trump card: the full chat log from the IRC channel #burgersandfries from when the Zoe Quinn “scandal” first erupted in mid-August up until September 6th. All anyone had to do, they suggested, was to read the log, and they would soon see that Quinn was presenting a distorted picture based on out-of-context, “cherry-picked” quotes.
Of course, reading this particular log is a bit easier said than done: it’s 3756 pages, in 10-point type, of chaotic overlapping IRC conversations.
This is a classic case of what’s come to be known as “doc dumping,” which Wikipedia helpfully defines as
