Turns out it’s not just me having racism and misogyny problems in Overwatch competitive. I saw Wil Wheaton reblog this article from mic.com about it, as well as this thread on the Reddit Overwatch forum, and yeah – it did get a lot worse in Season III.

And so far, nobody official seems to be doing much about it. And people doing it won’t stop until it hurts them, so I’m definitely going with my announcement and plan as a de rigueur thing before all competitive matches in Series IV.

Meanwhile, back in quickplay, I’ve started singing what I call the Tracer Tank song again, because Tracer is a tank in the right circumstances and the right levels. NO, SHE IS, REALLY. I have golded so many times for objective time as Tracer that it’s hilarious.

Tracer tank / Tracer tank
movin’ the payload
’cause somebody has to

where the fuck is Reinhardt?
where the fuck is D.va?
i could be that Reinhardt
if i really wanted

let’s all move the payload
i said everybody
okay fine I’ll do it
objective gold again

I mean, think about it. If you’re on offence in a payload level, and you’re good at her dodging motion/blinking/rewind, it works out to an effective hitpoint/armour total of easily 350 points, assuming only one rewind – much more if you’re lucky and good. I have beaten back one-on-three facedowns across the payload, more than once.

How does that work? Base health/armour of 150. Near-double that to 290 from your own health, doubled, with use of rewind. You get 10 points per second back from being on the payload; survive five seconds – not hard if you are good with her movement – and that’s another 100 points (with the single rewind), which gets you up to 390. Survive 10 seconds, that’s 490. Survive 15, 590.

Survive, oh, 2:09 like I did in one game last night as Tracer Tank? That’s 2580+300 hit/armour points (tho’ that assumes more rewinds, as it would), for a total of 2880.

Bulletproof. Reinhardt? Roadhog? Paper people.

And that’s not even getting into how the payload is functionally a motion-restricted shield with infinite hit points and infinite duration.

Tracer is a tank.

(Really, of course, Tracer shouldn’t be your group’s tank. For one thing, this whole shtick falls apart if they have a Sombra who knows what she’s doing. Even without that, it’s not Tracer’s best mode, and usually if I’m doing it, the team I’m on isn’t very good. But we all know the number of people that just won’t get on the goddamn payload, right? I was on one of those a couple of days ago where I literally solo-escorted the payload from Objective A to (just short of) the Eichenwald castle gate entirely by myself. It was hilarious.)

Sorry I haven’t been doing much with the band blog lately. Frankly, all my blogging energy has been used working against the literal fascist movement which has grabbed partial power and is trying to grab more.

I blog at Dreamwidth and it’s echoed to Livejournal. Here’s my post on Milo’s support of child pedastry, for example, which I wrote last night. The Republicans have been fine with his vicious misogyny, overt and savage white supremacy, and slanderous attacks on transgendered people; let’s see if they’re also on board with 28-year-old men fucking 13 year old boys.

I mean, we already know they’re fine with 50-year-old men raping 13 year old girls, but everybody knows the only way to end up dead in politics is to get caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Because boys are valuable and girls aren’t.

Apparently, CPAC (biggest conservative political conference, where he has a headline speech this year) and his fans in general all knew about this already – the interview I’m quoting ran over a year ago. And they’re okay with that. Monstrous filth.

Anwyay, I’ve been getting used to being back in full-time war mode for a couple of months now. Since this movement has always hated women and queers (unless, apparently, they’re pederast fascists), I’ve had to do this my whole life – but I had kind of some time off for a little while, and it made me soft. Hopefully I can return to band stuff more regularly, as I start to feel more ramped up on all this again.

Hopefully.

Is it just me, or is Overwatch competitive mode becoming kind of a cesspit? I had to drop from another game due to misogynists going on – at me specifically – about feminist “cunts.” I’ve had to drop other games due to people going off on killing all the “ni**ers” and just chanting white supremacist horseshit into voice chat, too.

I actually called this round’s douchebag leader on a lighter weight rant a couple of minutes before, when they were going off about horrible feminists, saying, “I’m trying to figure out how to respond to this, as the actual feminist on this team who is the also only one actually taking the point,” and they shut up for a minute or two after I’d captured half of the point solo. (We’d’ve taken the whole thing right then if anyone else had showed up, but I can only play one-on-four for so long.)

But after we captured the first point and started our first big push on the second, they doubled down, so mid-push I just said “You know what, fuck this, fuck all of you, enjoy losing, I’m out” and dropped, leaving them five-on-six and without their time-on-point and kills leader.

Unfortunately, while that does cost them, it costs me more than them in ranking. So I’ve come up with something better. Next time I’m in competitive, I’m going to go on team chat first thing and say some variation on:

Hiya! Tracer here. So, apparently, this is a thing you have to say now, which is horrible, but:

If you’re going to hijack team chat to go on some racist or misogynist rant, my response will be to go back to spawn and practice wall climbing and stuff until you quit or we lose. I’m not joking, that’s just what’s gonna happen, ’cause I don’t game with dickbags.

So if that’s anybody’s plan, please, go ahead and drop now, it’s not an official game yet, and we can all go play with better people.

Nobody? Great.

I haven’t done this before now because I’ve been too antsy about getting back into competitive at all, because of how nasty my last several experiences have been. But that is nonetheless my plan.

In related news, in quickplay yesterday there was someone with a Pepe-the-Frog-type name on enemy team. He may have been backfill, because I didn’t spot him at game start. But once I spotted him in the game, I went after and killed him immediately, and made it my first priority the rest of the game to find and kill him first, without fail.

I killed him like five times. As far as I could tell, he was never a factor in the game again, and we completely steamrolled his team. (Even before that. I just accelerated the process, because fuck you you kek-worshipping neofascist numerologist shitfiend, just fuck you.)

So I encourage everyone else who is not a total douchebag Overwatch player to join me in one or both of these routines, ’cause there’s sure as hell no way PSN is going to do anything about it. I’ll probably get some shit – particularly for the speech – but I don’t fucking care anymore, I’m sick of this.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love this game. I was in pretty early and re-optimised our network and even bought a PS4 Pro so I could play it better. (Minion Paul’s PS4 was crashy.) But you pull this crap, and I will make it cost you, on my team or not. And if I earn a rep, so be it. This is a rep I am perfectly fine with earning, because I am done.

Please enjoy “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” on guitar and unbalanced washing machine, by Aaron McAvoy.

h/t to @gfish on Twitter

As expected, Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as secretary of education. When the two GOP “no” votes were announced a few days ago, I knew that meant the other 48 were locked down; I’ve been around this carousel before.¹

But the fights right now are mostly not about winning. We’re going to lose these. The GOP have power and don’t give a fuck about you, and that’s been official since the Hastert Rule.² What these fights are about are having the ability to keep fighting. About keeping possibly meaningful elections, things like that. We’re fighting a six-month war to fight a two-year war to fight a four-year war, as a start.³

So I’ve been beating this drum for a while and I’m going to keep beating it: until opposition start paying attention to state and local elections, nothing will change. The situation on the ground for the Democratic Party is nightmarish, because Democrats much of the time just can’t be bothered, and gerrymandering will continue to make the Federal level worse. There is no – I mean zero – probability of a Republican turnaround on gerrymandering for the foreseeable future, and therefore no likelihood of political relief on that front except possibly through citizen initiative.

They have power; they don’t care about how they get it; they will use all tools possible until and unless they are forced to stop. Do not appeal to decency, do not appeal to fairness, because they do not fucking care. Get it through your head: no fucks are given beyond “do Republicans keep power”? There may be some local pockets of exceptions, but push comes to shove, they will go along. All but without fail. Know this.

(Also, people are talking about terrible poll numbers for Trump? 86% of Republicans approve of his performance as of day 16. That’s all that matters to them. If those numbers start to fall in-party, then the situation changes – but not before.)

So. If your state is Republican but has has citizen initiatives, your Federal option is to put together a popular state initiative to force meaningful district reform. This will take some time. Outrage, complaints, do it because it’s good PR – and more importantly, keeps you within the Overton window – but it won’t change results. You need initiatives. There are rumours of some kind of coordinated effort to start working on this, but I haven’t seen anything I can pin down. That’d be a good thing to pin down.

The bigger deal is that you have to start PAYING ATTENTION to the BORING LOCAL CRAP. Learn that it matters. Figure out your state and local governments, know who your reps are, and get working on them. Because in the end, that’s where political power starts.

It’s a long fight. Don’t get yourself burned out, because it’s going to get worse before it gets better; there is no magic solution, there is no fast solution. It’s a long haul grind, and even when you win, don’t think it’s over – we thought fascism was over, and oh look, now we’ve got neofascists and white nationalists in the White House.

Deal with that, accept it, because this is what it takes. Not dealing with that – well…

…that’s how we got here.
 

1: Don’t be fooled; we never had an actual shot here. The Republican Party has the discipline of an authoritarian parliamentary party and gives no fucks outside its own. The two “no” votes were allowed solely to give them political cover for the constituencies; they were knowingly-harmless-to-DeVos “no” votes, as political cover. If their votes were actually needed, they would’ve been “yes.” This is standard party procedure in the Senate; has been for decades, as anyone who has gone through this enough times can tell you – Harry Reid was a master of this, and this was simple Reid playbook copypasta. THAT DOES NOT MEAN DON’T FIGHT: first, all resistance makes them expend money and time (the latter being in shorter supply than the former), and second, it keeps the Overton window where you need it. The fight still matters, just… don’t expect to win these.

2: No bill can proceed without a majority of Republicans in support, regardless of House total support or popular support. That’s the weak form. The strong form – aspired to by the “Permanent Republican Majority” crowd – was “no bill can proceed unless it can pass entirely by Republican votes.” The explicit intent of the strong form was to make opposition parties irrelevant. I think it’s pretty clear they’re going for the strong form now.

3: The six-month war at the Federal level is keeping a court system. That’ll be hard. At the popular level, it’s maintaining some elements of consensus reality. (“Anything I don’t like” being “Fake news.”) We lose that, we’ve lost everything, and it’s harder than keeping the court system. Bannon, Trump, and both the fundamentalist and authoritarian movements want to eliminate the courts as a check-and-balance, and override fact-based media and decision making, both to clear the way for complete power. If we win the six-month war, the two-year war is probably going to add focus around fighting Attorney General Sessions. You’ll note I’m already using the title – his appointment won’t be stopped, and it’ll probably be 54-46. If somehow we can make it 52-48, I’ll consider that much a big victory. But the two-year war will be around preserving voting rights, and it will also be hard. Very hard indeed.

oh look, it’s a top-of-post eta: All of Bandcamp’s profits today are going to the ACLU, so that’s awesome. Go cruise around, check other bands not just us, see if there’s anything you like, buy it. Doesn’t have to be our work, just go do the thing, eh?

Anyway, so, yeah. It’s been more than a little bad-crazy and it shows no signs of stopping. Hell, just staying my current degree of sane these days involves a lot of Overwatch, so let’s talk about that.

I’m a Tracer main. I play a good bit of Pharah and D.va and I’m not a half-bad Ana or Zenyatta, but the outright majority of my playtime is Tracer.

One of the things I drive for is damage efficiency. And by that, I mean no “trash damage” – damage done that does not lead to a character elimination. So if I gold medal in damage, and don’t gold in kills and/or objective kills? I’m not playing well, even if we win.

It’s not like with Junkrat, who has so much splatter weaponry, right? Splash damage is part of his game. There’s enough of it that even “trash damage” has impact, just by tying up enemy support. My area of effect, by contrast, is tiny, and therefore, it needs to be effective.

There are four primary offensive stats in Overwatch games: total kills, objective kills, time spent on the objective itself, and total damage. If I get golds in all four, that’s good! But if I gold/gold/gold/silver or gold/gold/gold/bronze (total kills, objective kills, time on objective, total damage)? That’s great. It means I’m not wasting my shots. It says my damage output is disproportionately effective, and says better things, to my mind, then four golds. (And I kind of wish Overwatch acknowledged that.)

So last night, I got gold/gold/gold/NO MEDAL in a victory, which means like no junk damage. Led team in total kills, objective kills, and time spent on objective, despite being no higher than fourth of six in total damage done.

That is some goddamn efficiency.

I don’t think I’ve managed gold/gold/gold/NONE before, and I’m really happy about it.

I’ve got a song I’m writing, “Manic Pixie Murder Machine.” It’s very much not together yet but I think I see where it’s going, and of course, it’s about Tracer. And that is the kind of Tracer I want to be in-game.

Surely some of you have to play Overwatch. Who do you main?

i’m not your goddamn limey waifu honey
i’m a manic pixie murder machiiiiiiiiiiiine

This is the best song you’ll ever hear about a small and dumpy Vancouver mall. Yes, it’s a low bar, but I used to shop there sometimes because it was convenient (it’s in Mt. Pleasant, on Kingsway, I had friends living around there), and this really does kind of capture the place.