So, how about that Gamer Gate, then?

By now, I don't think I could find anything that the GamerGaters do surprising anymore. They've done everything except assault and murder someone, and their rhetoric sounds too much like that MRA asshole who murdered a bunch of college women in California a few months ago.

It's like a massive social mental illness that they're spreading amongst each other.

Haha. He looks like Andy Samberg dressed up like a sleazeball for a Saturday Night Live sketch.

A glimpse into the future perhaps

Well, looks like the Escapist's editor fucked up big time. They even interviewed Slade Villena aka Rogue Star, ffs. Found Devin's old twit with this in it, by the way:

Holy cow. That's really sad, and I feel bad for the nice people at the Escapist. Ffs, 4 of the devs they interviewed are pro-GG, two of them MRAs, the one called grimachu has an article called "In Defense of Rape" on his blog.

On one hand I find the escapist forums have become pretty much intolerable with every single GG related post turning into a 500 rep. pissing contest with a nice helping of douchebags and assholes on top, on the other hand I think the escapist has handled this overall situation pretty well all things considered.

I can't fault for at least trying to steer this mess into a constructive discussion but sadly the overall problem of the #derpityderp side prevails even here i.e. the fucknut conspiracy morons.

Edit: I just read that interview with the escapist founder and adam baldwin... this shit is just depressing

Time to cheer myself up by headbutting a demon t-rex into the flank of a skyscraper, praise lord kamiya.

Very good article about the thing #gg is supposed to be about
www.zenofdesign.com/what-games-journalism-integrity-actually-is-and-what-it-isnt/

Yep, although the [HASH]GamerGate hashtag has gone up for who knows what reason, its reputation has only increasingly gotten worse. It's only a matter of time before they tear themselves apart. Much like Tommy Wiseau.

Yahtzee is still the main reason I go there but jim and bob are awesome 2. The escapist is pretty much the only games focused website I visit. The editorial climate there falls in line with what I like and they aren't as hyperbolic as say , polygon or rps. The forums kinda suck atm but hey, can't have it all.

Let me start off by saying this will get a little long, maybe corny, and have me end up coming off like a dumb butt, but it's something that I've got to lay out for myself.



Like many of you, I grew up playing video games. I'm the youngest of 3 brothers by a few years, so we always had consoles of some kind since I can remember. It was steady line from the NES onwards, but sometime around the later 2000s I kind of fell out with gaming. I still played games, just not as often as I used to. I had a Wii but not 360 or PS3 or a gaming PC. It's not that I was playing "casual" games on them, I love the Galaxy series and think they're 2 of the best games from that generation. I don't know why games didn't really hold my interest that much anymore, or even why I really got back into them at the start of 2013, but I did. So flash forward to a few months ago. I'm back to playing games regularly and participating in discussions about them on various forums and sites. I visit places that do a good job of keeping the discussions civil and weed out the most toxic elements.



Then GG happened.



I'm talking about the actual beginning. The Zoe Quinn thing. I kind of knew about Depression Quest and that there was a lot horrible stuff directed at her since it was put on Steam Greenlight late last year. There were other similar incidents around then too like Anita Sarkeesian among others. These were all in my mind when this started to happen, but for whatever reason I didn't really think any deeper about it. I just shrugged and went "Well the internet can be horrible." The first day or two it's just a bunch of rumbling by people with half formed ideas playing a game of telephone. But it really exploded when Internet Aristocrat posted his sub-Loose Change conspiracy nonsense video. I don't think he gets enough blame for stoking the fires of this. It was suddenly the story of how "ZQ had sex for positive coverage." facts be damned. And it was everywhere. Even though there were plenty of people who saw through the lies that were being spread and tried to combat it, there were still many that were just swept up in the false headline version of the story. It wasn't about the journalist that allegedly gave the positive coverage, it was all about ZQ. Her entire personal life was on trial, and what was posted was some of the most insidious and vile forms of misogyny I'd ever seen. I can't stress that enough, it was vicious, disgusting, abhorrent. These weren't Twitter randos, these were people apart of a community that I actively engaged with that I thought were above this kind of stuff. I couldn't ignore it anymore. I was back into gaming and this is what was happening, it was sickening. 

A few days later Andrew Todd posted the first of the BAD articles. It was such a relief that another community that I was apart of actively pushed back against it and were so open to newcomers. This is the point were I don't like saying it because I sound like a dumb butt, but it was around this point that it dawned on me. It's not just a big coincidence that all these attacks towards women are going on at once. Pardon my French, but shit is fucked up. It made me realize that just agreeing that women are viewed by a large portion of society as something less than human, or that the Right in the US has been continually restricting reproduction rights across the country isn't good enough. For some fucking reason this was all codified by GG. This sounds overdramatic, but I had to stop being the person who was "not part of the problem."

So in summary I don't want to thank GG, but because of it it has put me through a lot of introspection. Not all of it has been pleasant, but in the end I think it's made me a less ignorant person than I was before, and I still have a long way to go from here.

Because he caters to their dumb primitive mammal desires. Ironic how people who like to use words like "fact" and "logic" are actually driven by simplistic emotions like hatred.

Gotta say that during that time since BAD articles I've reflected on a lot of stuff I didn't before and met (well, here and on Twitter) a lot of great people.

I can't find the tweet in my timeline, but someone tweeted a screenshot of someone from 8chan who literally wrote "why don't we murder Anita? maybe her ideals will die with her and she won't become a martyr". And the responses to that tweet weren't about how absolutely horrible and insane it was for anyone to ever write that, the responses were GamerGaters crying that the screenshot didn't include the responses to that post.

They literally care more about defending themselves than they do about MURDERING SOMEONE.

Edit: Here:

New Badass Digest article!

badassdigest.com/2014/10/15/why-gamergate-already-lost/