Denial

To be fair, this is poetry heavily influenced by Modernism - TS Eliot is specifically cited in the dedications, and the imitation is clear, down to the Greek and Latin quotes at the beginnings of sections. Something Eliot did was pull bits and pieces from both high and low culture - Sanskrit devotions, lines from music-hall ditties - to represent the fracturing of discourse. Of course, one thing about that is that Eliot had a huge breadth of cultural knowledge, and thus didn't pull a lot of lines from the same artist, or even the same relatively narrow cultural milieu. Coincidentally, of course, many of the Moderns were also more or less associated with a reactionary movement intent on threatening others until, exhausted by conflict and fearful of more violence, they stayed quiet as isolated and brutalized marginalized populations were attacked. But that might be a little bit Godwinny...

There is a balance of abreaction and sympathy, definitely. I get that with Totalbiscuit, to a degree - my mother had the same cancer, it's exhausting and undignified, the possibility, no matter the odds, of recurrence is a constant weight on the mind, and the treatments are draining and uncomfortable. I wouldn't blame anyone for not being at their best. On the other hand, I think he's probably revealing a lot more than he might think, and not necessarily getting good feedback on it (he has an intern whose job it is to pre-filter what people are saying to and about him online, IIRC). After the agreement with Rosen not to talk further about Gamergate, he's been playing a long and embarrassing game of "not touching, can't get angry", whereas Rosen seems to have moved on pretty quickly. Watching the transition from praising Intel's diversity campaign and telling Gaters that it was irrational to write it off because it happened to involve FemFreq to the parroting of Gamergate-approved language about "trust fund babies" in about a week was pretty sad. And his latest "not touching", the release of a 4-page Twine game to show that Twine games aren't proper games, just highlights a regrettable failure to understand that engine complexity is not a diagnostic or evaluative criterion. That is, the mechanical process of making a Twine game is pretty simple*, whereas making a Twine game that is any good is hard. And, of course, the skills that went into creating Depression Quest transfer to, for example, the narrative design of Framed. (It's notable that these games intended to point out how shitty "SJW" games are are never any good - see also Oppression Quest, Gone Homo - no, really - and so on. The possible exception is Dear Esteban, which is distinct, I think, because created by someone who loved Dear Esther, but also saw in it elements that were susceptible to affectionate parody.) So, yeah. I think on the whole I'd be happier without the insights into people's psyches, really. (*In fact, Twine isn't a good tool for what he wanted to do. It would have been quicker to have built it in NotePad.)

Gamergate has now raised $300,074,000 for good causes. That's some Gates Foundation level fundraising right there.

Oh, wow. I just realised the I think unintentional irony of "Operation Skynet". In The Terminator, Skynet eventually became self-aware.

If memory serves, that was Operation Skynet. And yeah - I think that's a pretty big part of the thinking. If you are used to nobody paying any attention to you, having people suddenly telling you you're amazing can be very intoxicating. I don't mean to denigrate young casters or hobby writers for this, in particular, because I think it's also affected quite a few of the golden-mean "two sides" guys. Which is precisely the goal of the relentless lovebombing, of course...

This is the guy whose associate has been banned from Twitter for sexually harassing people criticising Gamergate, right? Not a _huge_ surprise, maybe...

It's worth noting, however, that both Wardell and Vavra appear to be motivated by antipathy towards the games press, rather than concerns about the purity of their niche. Wardell for its reporting on the sexual harassment allegations against him in 2012, and Vavra, as near as I can tell, for this Luke Plunkett article in 2014. Which is a salutary reminder that Gamergate isn't really new - it's TumblrinAction with a slightly different name and user base.

Wait, what?

(I am now imagining NASA as Captain America and the ESA as Batroc.... ze Leapair!)

Pretty much! A female writer mentioned that space dude Matt Taylor's shirt - which had pictures of women in PVC sexy clothes printed on it - was maybe a poor choice for a public appearance, in terms of making science look welcoming for women. Cue the familiar deliberate misinterpretation and accusations of "neo-puritanism" - because "pictures of sexy women may not be appropriate in a workplace" is being taken to mean "sex is bad always"*. She got lots of death threats, predictably. Ignoring those death threats in order to sneer at the idea of questioning Matt Taylor's sartorial judgment - for which he himself was rapidly and it seems sincerely contrite - seems to me sort of weird. But then I'm an adult human. * Something that really stuck with me on this was Anita Sarkeesian's comment that angry dudes sent her hardcore porn because they thought that porn was a form of hate speech when addressed to feminists.

So, not sure where exactly this fits, but it feels relevant here because it's basically still feeding in to the Gamergate crowd... I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the human eye - like rods and cones - that controls whether or not people can see death threats directed at woman, and what we have in Gamergate is the consequence of modern science not being able currently to detect that element or its absence.

Kinda sorts - but that's part of the problem. The kind of nerd who runs the Internet is usually Stanford or MIT educated, often comes from solid money, and can code, or manage coders. I'm trying to remember the article I read recently that pointed out that you have to stretch the definition of "geek" a long way when you talk about the geek aristocracy to make them remotely resemble the people in middle America watching Star Trek movies and playing Call of Duty. This is one of (many!) problems with the "Gamers as Third Gender" infographic - it forgets that it's talking about gamers halfway through, and starts talking about nerds instead, when not all nerds are gamers and not all gamers are nerds. And it has a view of nerds that actually seems to be based more on The Big Bang Theory than actual experience. There are lots of people into geek culture, and into gaming, who aren't academically excellent, and for that matter there are lots of gamers who are not particularly into nerd culture.

Abed from Community and Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec are the ones that sprung immediately to mind, but without knowing what is meant by "nerd" it's hard to tell... I interpret "nerd" as meaning someone with an interest in a thing or things far in excess of a quote-unquote normal level - so, one can be a military history nerd, or a car nerd, or whatever. Like "gamer", it's a term that covers a hugely larger catchment area than the group that is seeking to use it as an identity here.

Has there been anything so far on monetization? I think that's something I'd be really interested in...

Yeah, this Voldemort thing is getting kind of silly...

Yeah. I don't know about you, but I list every minimum-wage job I have ever had on my LinkedIn page. It impresses people who might want to employ me as a consultant!

So, on an academic level I know that staring in disbelief at the Gamergate detective squad will at some point get old, but oh my God these guys.

Meanwhile, an absolutely fascinating insight into the internal politics of Gamergate's leading citizens in this account of the discussion around the Denton "leak" by Brennan.

Nah, he's all-in on Gamergate now. Tweeted about how nobody except Gamergate was respecting his moderate opinion, so they must be right. Not perhaps in quite so many words. In other news, I confess to having LOLed at this:

Man, sorry really is the hardest word to say, isn't it? This may, incidentally, be related to a minor side-discussion where notionally moderate Gater Oliver Campbell claimed that he had evidence from a federal source that at least two threats had been faked. The subsequent mess can largely be found on his Twitter feed, but at a point he shifted to YouTube, recording a stream he subsequently appears to have deleted. As we know, Gaters tend to be remarkably trusting when told things they want to believe. Regardless, the idea that TB has more relevant experience of getting death threats over the last few years than Anita Sarkeesian, and is in a position to give her advice about it, is sort of hilarious. I mean, bless his heart for trying to help, but this is a full-on Men Explain Things To Me moment... Bjorn - there's a KiA thread here - basically, RogueStar posted account information from the original hack of Polytron on Twitter. Someone pointed out that he had uploaded a version without all the contact details blanked out, to which he replied something like "oops, my bad!". I popped over to Twitter to see if I could find the originals, but his thread is... busy.

Um. I get the point that's being made here, and I agree that this is a difficult statement (if context matters, the whole transcript is here, with a follow-up here and a sortapology here, none of which change much). But, cancer is terrifying. Even cancer with a good survival and recovery rate. And it's terrifying and exhausting for the sufferer's loved ones, also. I don't think Totalbiscuit has done anything to help Gamergate transcend its origins. I don't understand why he thinks he is acting as a voice of moderation. To be honest, I don't get why he thinks he should be acting at all - the other YTers whose feelings were hurt by getting criticisms from outside the filter bubble early on have stepped away. And I don't think his brand is being helped particularly, either, by signal boosting people like KingofPol. But I feel like, regardless of all that, there's value in not going there, even as illustrative satire.

Apparently Internet Aristocrat and ... um.. Jay3D, maybe? are also stepping back from Gamergate. And Roguestar has set off on his own to go deep on the investigation of corruption in the IGF, with an elite cadre of agents. We are getting closer to the moment when the twin poles of Gamergate are Totalbiscuit and PressFart. Which will be kind of like the prisoner's dilemma, but with no good solution.

So, in the last week... KingofPol engaged in Holocaust denial on a live stream - which not only looked bad for him, and for the co-streamers who laughed and egged him on as he did so, but also then made Gamergate as a whole look terrible as Gater after Gater ploughed into critics, posting the dictionary definition of "denial" and insisting that all he did was question the numbers. RogueStar published financial information taken from the criminal doxxing of Phil Fish - forgetting, as Milo Yiannopoulos did with GameJournoPros, to hide all the personal info. In doing so, he destroyed the credibility of the GamerGate Harassment Patrol. KingofPol then published a laughable PhotoShop, claiming it was proof positive that Nick Denton was paying people to infiltrate GamerGate. This was snapped up and reposted by the Gater Media, and drove people to create even more ridiculous 'Shops, that were then seized on as conclusive proof. Oh, and Milo and the Ralph Retort started hassling Liana Kershner again. And now Totalbiscuit is doubling down on doubling down on Anita Sarkeesian's threats not being credible, on the grounds that she is still alive. I mean, I guess there's a degree of security in the passing of the news cycle, but I'm starting to see why GamerGate is so reluctant to nominate leaders. I mean, wow.

Oh, man. Rami has had some public Facebook discussions, and they just get totally monstered by, AFAICT, Gamergate Nederlaandse - which appears to be three or four game design students with a _lot_ of time on their hands - and Slade Villenas. (I take it as a good sign that interest in Gamergate in the Netherlands appears to be sufficiently low that they have to buddy up with Belgium to have enough people for the livestreaming. Gamergate Vlaamse!)

Surprising nobody, it turns out that TB had not actually read the Zoe Post until yesterday. I mean, I can't really blame him - it's pretty much unreadable. But then I am not the first citizen of a movement based on it.