Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
We’re watching the extended Desolation of Smaug tonight at the Lair.
Thorin to Bilbo, wild-eyed: Did you find the Arkenstone? Did you find it?!
Minion Anna, as Bilbo: Uh, Thorin… are you wearing your crazypants?
Minion Paul, as Thorin: I have more than one pair!
Solarbird, as Thorin: …and I’m wearing them all.
Check this out: listening to dead satellites. Or at least semi-dead satellites. These are satellites with dead batteries but with transmitters which turn on whenever the solar panels are in the right direction anyway. Some of the noises they make are weird and interesting.
I particularly like Transit 5B-5, launched 1964, for military navigation purposes. But recordings of many different satellites can be found at the link. Echos of the cold war – fitting, don’t you think, for the days surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?
So Mozilla’s The Open Standard published a pro-GamerGate op-ed on Tuesday and has been on a “gamergate is a legit issue with facts on both sides” rampage on Twitter.
Of course, the very idea that there are “facts” on the GamerGate side other than having been set up to harass and force women out of gaming and tech is laughable. As those of us with sanity keep pointing out, we have the goddamn chat logs, this is proven.
But then they went reaching out to the stalker ex-boyfriend with a restraining order to write for them, causing the GamerGate misogynist crowd to come cheering in en masse.
Now, I’d been in this already, but bringing in the stalker ex-boyfriend with a restraining order?! Really?! So I threw that in their collective face, and apparently, that was a little too embarrassing or inconvenient or something:
But despite that, they’re sticking to their facts-on-both-sides legitimisation of the whole misogynist movement, talking about encouraging “active participation.” The official Firefox account was spending a lot of time on it in particular. (Here’s an image if the tweet doesn’t load.)
so, hey, @firefox officially thanked each of these Gamergaters for their "active participation" in GG earlier today! pic.twitter.com/1wrW9d9mSt
— Aja Romano (@ajaromano) November 5, 2014
So yeah, that’s awesome, by which I mean horrible. Given the degree of Brogrammer Rampage I’ve been hearing secondhand out of Mozilla dev offices lately – from guys, I might add – I can’t say I’m entirely shocked. Disappointed that it’s so official, yes, but not shocked.
Still, it’s a bit of a kick to the face. Guess I’ll be adding “delete Firefox from Lair computers” to my todo list today.
eta2:: Hello and welcome, surprise flood of Facebook users! You may find my other posts on GamerGate and related topics of interest as well.
eta: Oh look, here’s a writeup of previous Mozilla tacit support of GamerGate.
ps: It was a pretty quick explosion, I have to say. Blogosphere events last a few days; Tumblr ones do, too. Twitter, though – this was up and down in a few hours. I went up to double-digit interaction updates per refresh in about 10 minutes, sat there for a while just trying to keep up, then back down to a more normal one or two an hour by evening. Very strange to see happening. I’ve had stuff go viral before on Tumblr – far larger than this – but this felt really ephemeral in ways those didn’t. Interesting.
I feel the need to drop in after the Felicia Day dox in response to her blog post how GamerGate misogynists are affecting her life, former NFL player Chris Kluwe tweeted that despite writing this epic slamfest:
Why Gamergaters Piss Me the Fuck Off
…nobody doxxed him, and he says he’s not even a tough target. But they went after Felicia Day. Ineptly, but still. Choice of target says everything.
So go on. Keep pretending this isn’t about misogyny. I fucking dare you.
Also of interest:
But it’s about “ethics.” Not about hating women.
So after all the eye surgery adventures last winter, I fell six months behind on everything, and then summer was filled with surprise extra tasks and work that aren’t related to music… or, really, fun… at all. But I had a lot of catching up to do, and it needed to happen.
And I finally have been. I haven’t been around the last few days in no small part because I have finally beaten down my to-do list to items that were on it before GeekGirlCon 2013 (the weekend my right eye went lol no) and all of those adventures. I diagnosed the roomba’s problem and repair parts are on the way. The minor ceiling repairs (cosmetic, really) upstairs that I started right before all that? Finished. The small mountain of weird credit union rewards points I apparently had? Sorted and spent! And so on.
Not to mention the album, of course. I just dropped Release Candidate 1 for another track. o/
The downside of all that kind of catch-up work is that I’m really kind of out of performance shape, and I need to start working on that now. Studio shape – that, I’m in. But that’s very different to performance shape.
I guess it’s a little like the difference between being trained for sprinting and trained for a marathon. Right now, I’ve been in studio a couple of months, I’m real good at short bursts, because that’s what you need, and you need to be your best at it. But that’s tiring. Live, you also need to be at your best, but in a different way that doesn’t crash your stamina. And I need to switch back to that.
Plus, I need to be booking events. I mean damn. But it’s about time to be thinking about spring anyway, so at least, this time, I’m not late.
But yeah. Catching up, one task at a time, and far enough along that old things are coming off the stack. I’m tired, but it’s the good kind of tired, and now, the decks are almost clear, and we can be moving forward again.
Over on Facebook, a person trying to be “middle of the road” on GamerGate says that he sees both sides of GamerGate as extremist, and as being pretty much the same. And no, as automatic as it seems to be to set up such false symmetries, I won’t accept that.
One side is explicitly and specifically intending to drive women out of the industry and feminist discussion of video games, with particular focus on a few specific hate targets. This isn’t speculation; I’ve read the chat logs. There are screencaps; there were more logs actually provided by GamerGate leaders who screamed “context” when those came out, but they really needed to learn that calling context should only be done when the context helps your case, not hurts it.
So the nature of this movement isn’t really disputable. Here’s a reasonable Wired article that points to a lot of original sources, from last month, before the bomb and shooting threats became a weekly problem.
And here an interview with Eron Gjoni, the ex-boyfriend with a restraining order against him whose post really set off the misogynist explosion which had been smouldering for a while, and became GamerGate. In the referenced post, he accused Zoe of cheating on him and sleeping with a reporter to get better coverage of her game. Problem is, said reporter never wrote about her or her game, aside from a very brief mention months before they are even alleged to have become involved. And despite everything that this has exploded into, and the harassment that has spread to like wildfire, he says he would absolutely do it again.
And he has in fact recently resigned form his job to spend more time coordinating GamerGate. Oh, and he declines to either stop violating his restraining order or stop seeking to have it removed.
If someone is consciously associating with “GamerGate,” this is what they are associating themselves with.
You – the generic “you” – can make a real good point about journalism being a farce. You can make a better point about it being systemically corrupted. But you can’t ignore that this is a systemic problem through journalism, and you can’t ignore that this subfield isn’t any worse (and may indeed be better than) the field as a whole, and you can’t ignore that the only thing that made these people care is…
…an ex-boyfriend, against whom there is a restraining order he keeps trying to get overturned, making a ragepost against his ex-girlfriend, saying she’s cheating with sex to get her games better coverage they clearly don’t deserve.
As a movement, this was started on and is still centred on rage against women commenting on and contributing to videogames.
On what you’re calling the other side – there isn’t a movement, in a greater sense, like there is with GamerGate. There are a lot of people opposed, sure – but to what? A lot of things. To harassment, death threats, bomb threats, rape threats, misogyny, and the silencing of women, and – ironically – the attacks on journalism, like the Wired UK article I linked above. All of these things appear to make you, in the GG world, a “social justice warrior.” (Personally, I think of myself more as a social justice rogue, but maybe that’s just how I roll… my stats. XD)
But there’s not an identity, like there is with GG. There are a lot of different identities, sure – but if opposing the Tories makes the Bloc, Liberals, NDP, and Greens all one movement, then I’m not really sure how you can define “movement” in a way that has any meaning at all.
Essentially, a Green saying “Harper’s agenda must be stopped” doesn’t make them part of a group lobbying for Quebec separatism. But calling yourself a GG does make you part of a group that is actively misogynist and is actively and continually threatening people.
Saying those two situations are the same is a false equivalence. That matters, because it makes “both sides the same,” which is about as untrue as can be managed in a socio-political situation. And that, in turn, downplays what the actual movement here – the GamerGate movement – is trying to do.
Through threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment, the visible bulk of the movement wants to force women and feminist commentary out of games – and, if you believe some of the threads on 4chan and 8chan, then out of geek culture as a whole. (They’ve gone fishing around for support in comics fandom already, I’ve seen it.) I do not believe it would stop there, and I do believe the evidence shows that it is profoundly misogynist.
And that is not the same thing at all.
Another week, another woman in gaming forced from her home by doxxing followed by threats of rape and murder. And, as usual, you have the chorus of idiots going on about how this is “really” about a real issue in games journalism.
Ignore the part where it was specifically set up as a misogynist harassment campaign to drive various people out of tech – we know this, we have the chat logs to prove it – ignore all that, because it’s “become something else…” that happens to achieve exactly the same effect.
And here exactly is why you can’t argue with the useful idiots. #GamerGate true-believers are the anti-vaxxers of the online world.
Seriously, come with me here. Anti-vaxxers are basing everything on the authenticity of a vaccines and autism paper written with a plan of knowing and intentional fraud. It was a lie, with a goal, and the perpetrators are in jail. But none of that deters the horde of fools and morons who are causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people through easily-preventable diseases worldwide.
#GamerGate true believers are basing everything on the authenticity of an online campaign created with a plan of knowing and intentional fraud. It was a smear, with a goal (of driving women from tech) – although in this case, the perpetrators are not in jail. Part of their documented strategy was to drag in a lot of useful idiots who would fall for it and bulk their numbers. And none of that deters the true believers who are doxxing and threatening women with rape and murder across the internet.
It’s exactly the same thing. And just as with the anti-vax movement, it needs to be taken seriously, because it’s causing real and lasting harm. It needs to be fought. Just don’t think you’re going to get through to them, because you’re not. Like the anti-vax fools, they’re locked in; any argument or discussion with them merely entrenches them further in their beliefs.
What you can do is make this shit trigger some fallout. Right now, it still doesn’t. Until it does, nothing will change. And since you can’t change their minds, you have to make damn well sure that these actions have some serious goddamn consequences. Lock them out of your dealings; lock them out of your businesses; lock them out of your events; lock them out of your lives. Because while there certainly is no law, there can damned well still be effects.
Some people are doing this already, but it has to hit a critical mass before it can take effect. Basically, it’s up to everyone who isn’t them and isn’t a direct target. Which is to say – it’s up to us.
eta: Hey, look, guess who got a bomb threat again, this time at GeekGirlCon. And there’s another harassment account already set up just for this.
Today marks the 3rd time I’ve gone on stage after specific death and bomb threats where issued to an event where I’m scheduled to speak.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 11, 2014
This is one of a several posts on Sexism and Racism in Geek Culture.
The real problem with MIDI is that every time I try to do MIDI I end up doing things like setting the SoundCanvas to ALL PERCUSSION SAMPLES and playing SMASHY SMASHY on the keyboard all night.
SMASH ALL THE DRUMS also all the sound effects and also the hilarious terrible fake scratches HI I AM not A DJ scratchy scratchy
MUSICIAN SMASH
this is hilarious. but not productive.
So, yeah. Everybody has to have their own versions of this, right? Surely they do. What’s yours?
SMASHY SMASHY
If you’re following the Doctor Who “Caretaker” post, you really want to check out this comment thread on the Livejournal echo.
Also, you’ll find this pair of comments on the primary blog post illuminating: Tony Cross on the classist military PE teacher trope, and my reply on how that matches racist tropes in North America.
This is really interesting. I hadn’t expected to get a convincing explanation here, and I rather have. This is an element of class I had been aware of in, say, a Great War context, but not as current.
So, yeah. “The Caretaker.”
I’m getting pretty close to “ring me up when Moffat is gone from Doctor Who.” And I’m not that entirely sure I’m going to turn on my phone’s ringer. Because right now, there is so very little to like and so very much not to, and I am out of patience with Mr. Moffat.
I don’t like – to paraphrase James Nicoll – that at the rate we’re going, we’ll end up with an entire episode consisting of the Doctor negging Clara for 50-odd minutes straight by the end of the season.
I don’t like Clara again being defined so entirely by what men think about what she’s doing. I particularly don’t like – as Leeson on The Doctor Who Podcast said – that it feels like some sort of competition of who is better at taking care of her. She’s a goddamn adult, she doesn’t need taking care of.
I don’t like Danny Pink anymore, in no small part because of what I just said. I kind of liked him in the first episode; since then he’s become more and more weirdly erratic and demanding in ways that set of alarm bells for me. (I did like him when he went all soldier-and-officer on the Doctor, though, in this episode. I’ll say that.)
I don’t like the Doctor demanding explanations about Clara’s boyfriend, even if I don’t like that character. Wanting to know? Sure. Feeling hurt or isolated if he’s kept out of the loop? Okay, I can see that. Demanding like he has some sort of goddamn right? Fuck you, Doctor.
This show has made me think, “FUCK YOU, Doctor. FUCK you.” And wow, do I not want to be thinking that.
I can take an abrasive Doctor. Sometimes I like it. It’s a delicate balance, a challenge, and I’m not convinced it’s a good idea, because in episodes like this, you end up with nothing to like about this Doctor, or any of these characters. Don’t get me wrong, that can work. You weren’t supposed to like anybody in Absolutely Fabulous either, and that didn’t stop it from being completely genius.
But I think the way Moffat is running this version only works if you have previous regenerations of the Doctor in your head. One, to remind you that eventually he’s not like this, and for another, to place this into contrast, which makes this in turn more interesting.
That’s called “writing entirely for the fans,” and over time, it’s a really bad idea.
But most of all – on top of everything else, the thing that really punched me in the face, the thing that’s making me think that maybe I’m done…
I really, really don’t like the Doctor turning the black maths teacher into “the PE instructor” over and over again.
I really do not fucking like the Doctor playing racist tropes as dismissals.
See, here’s the thing. I can take my own ox being gored with more … grace? With having more stomach? I can more easily deal with problematic material that’s problematic towards me than I can with problematic material that’s that so very problematic towards others. It’s one thing to be all dismissive of humans, I’m fine with that. It’s another to be pulling out racist shit.
Now, I’m willing to listen to people to say this isn’t such a fucking racist trope in the UK. I only want to hear it from Britons, and really, I prefer to hear it from Britons of colour. But I’m willing to listen to that.
Something tells me, though… I don’t think it’s that different.
eta: The original version of this post attributed a phrase to James at The Doctor Who Podcast; the statement was actually made by Leeson, and the post has been edited to reflect that.
eta2: Anna has added her reaction over on her blog. She has other issues I don’t.
THE NEW SINGLE
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