Friday Ephemera
Paranormal phenomenon, or possibly ants. || The owl and the pussycat. || The thrill of prepared slides. || WindowSwap. (h/t, Mick) || Today’s words are feminist media studies. || Also, ethnomathematics. The consequent drop in test scores is a good thing, apparently. || Scuba divers pinged by sonar. || South Korea’s lady divers. || Dog outwitted. || His day was worse than yours. || A brief history of the washing machine. || The washing machine museum. || The thrill of Victorian hygiene. From unhappy toilet arrangements to lead hair renewer. || Los Angeles, July, 2020. || Jigsaw of note. || Evacuation solution of note. || This, it turns out, is a thing that exists. || And finally, almost unbearably, tension mounts.
They really do call for the end of blind auditions in music.
And yet those athletes have to compete against each other to qualify for a team. That’s what qualifying trials or blind auditions are. Two people may be “essentially indistinguishable” of being able to compete a marathon in at least 2 hours 15 min, but having them compete against each other will have one end up faster than the other.
Otherwise, we just put together a pool of people who qualify at 2:15 and above, then select according to melanin to “reflect the community”? That’ll work.
I was fascinated by GamerGate
As was I, but for different reasons. My read on it was that it was just a faction split amongst extremely entitled gamers. I found it fascinating that both sides managed to be so transparently dishonest about their motives for so long, and how despite the massive amounts of handwringing and media coverage, absolutely nothing changed.
I consider it an excellent example of how Twitter spats don’t actually matter in the real world. (Yes, I know about cancel culture – the problem there is that people in charge of hiring and firing do think what happens on Twitter matters in the real world and panic. If, like the CEO of Goya foods, they just say “meh, whatever” and ignore it, nothing happens).
Otherwise, we just put together a pool of people who qualify at 2:15 and above, then select according to melanin to “reflect the community”?
The threshold will be steadily relaxed until a sufficient number of “diverse” individuals qualify.
Personally, I think that Woke Progressives should be required to get their medical care from affirmative action hires. Likewise legal services, auto repair, and so on. And there should be an airline just for them in which all the pilots, navigators and mechanics are affirmative action hires.
Another Cathedral just happens to catch Fire in France.
We still don’t know how Notre Dame caught fire do we? It must all be just a coincidence.
Ask a question, get an answer.
“… immediately launched into a complaint about the very people who had hired her.”
Charles Moore identifies the problem:
“bragging about how she has ‘rescued’ the game from ‘dudes’ who would have produced a toxic piece of trash had she not been there to save the day.”
This, of course, might explain why the plots in narrative games rarely make any damn sense.
As was I, but for different reasons
I’m not saying this to cause a stir, but I didn’t actually give any reasons for why I was fascinated by it, just that I was and that was how I came to know who Leigh Alexander was.
I consider it an excellent example of how Twitter spats don’t actually matter in the real world
I’m always genuinely surprised by how many people downplay or dismiss it’s significance and relegate it to a side-show of little importance.
Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were not only interviewed or profiled by almost every major news outlet, but there were invited to speak at The Broadband Commission Working Group on Gender of the United Nations in 2015.
Sarkeesian, meanwhile, has become a consultant for the very games companies she became famous for lambasting in her videos – as has Alexander, apparently.
Quinn has gone on to be employed as a comic book writer – despite lacking any prior interest in the medium and lacking both experience and aptitude for it.(Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, there’s been the so-called ComicsGate recently).
And speaking of the UN, it is rather striking that their He for She campaign using Emma Watson to promote feminism was actually launched in the June of that year passed almost completely without noticing – until the August / September and GamerGate when it spiked exponentially – do a Google Trends search if you don’t believe me.
And based on that, I would also argue quite strongly that the fact that the GamerGate hashtag trended for an unprecedented length of time on social media and generated so much publicity inspired others to provoke similar woke-inspired controversies such as that Gillette ad and others like it. (I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that a particularly aggressive wave of transactivism has seen an uptick since GamerGate).
I’m not suggesting that GamerGate was the only game in town (no pun intended) – clearly it wasn’t. But I think it’s greatest impact was in creating a huge wave of interest – largely oppositional – to the Wokeratti.
Take Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) – here was someone who until 2014 had been an occasionally employed IT worker living in a rented flat over a shop in Swindon. Yet within the space of less than five years he was reportedly earning as much as $12,000 a month and by the end of that period had become a political candidate widely discussed in British news media (if not elsewhere).
If nothing else, GamerGate brought together an audience in large numbers that were now actively interested enough in caring about the antics of Melissa Click at the University of Missouri, and who were also open to take a serious interest in the ideas of someone like Jordan Peterson.
I may well be wrong in the details, but I am fairly confident that the general point – that it was not an insignificant flash in the Twitter pan – still stands.
bragging about how she has ‘rescued’ the game from ‘dudes’ who would have produced a toxic piece of trash had she not been there to save the day.
It seems to me games creators would do well to make games that their customers actually want to play and are willing to pay for, rather than something that conforms to the narrow preoccupations of an activist clown that they’ve foolishly employed. To the extent that I’ve encountered it, the audience for games doesn’t seem particularly receptive to woke posturing. Which, it has to be said, is quite encouraging. And hiring people who openly despise that audience, the people giving you their money, seems… counterproductive.
Yes, I know about cancel culture – the problem there is that people in charge of hiring and firing do think what happens on Twitter matters in the real world and panic. If, like the CEO of Goya foods, they just say “meh, whatever” and ignore it, nothing happens.
Cancel culture can be ignored if your clients and your workers don’t really care. The bean canners of Goya Foods are happy to have their jobs, and don’t want to risk losing them. The people who buy the beans just want beans.
Hence it is yoga studios, bespoke coffee houses, left-wing newspapers etc that have people cancelled. They have both progressive clients and progressive workers. That the people successfully cancelled are almost always lefties themselves is the amusing bit.
The attempt at getting Formula One racing on board with BLM was amusing. There were just enough racers with the gumption to hold out, and so it fell over almost immediately. Wrong workers and wrong clients. That Lewis Hamilton is a prize prick helped, of course.
“There were just enough racers with the gumption to hold out, and so it fell over almost immediately.”
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it has. There was talk of it being a one-off but, although I usually skip through the pre-race rigmarole to the formation lap, I’m fairly sure I saw the same pillocks kneeling before the second Austrian race last week. It’ll be (fairly) interesting to see what happens tomorrow in Hungary.
It has to be said, though, that F1 Management only have themselves to blame. For over 60 years since the beginning of the championship, there wasn’t any official opening ceremony. The local promoter might arrange something, but the teams themselves used to completely ignore it, often carrying on pre-race interviews with the media as it went on in the background. (That lack of respect for formality and officialdom was one of the things I used to like about it. They were there to do their jobs, preparing cars to race, not to ponce around in pointless parades.)
That only changed about five or six years ago at the behest of… well, let’s just say “the organisers of the Russian Grand Prix”, because I don’t know if it actually came from Totally-Not-Gay-Vlad himself or not. So, as we say in Glasgow, hell mend them. They could have avoided the whole thing if they’d just left well enough alone.
I imagine the Hungarian crowd will be less than interested in their kneeling to BLM.
The cheek of fabulously wealthy drivers who race in China, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Azerbaijan and Russia to take the knee over race issues in the US is something that can only be laughed at.
The attempt at getting Formula One racing on board with BLM was amusing. There were just enough racers with the gumption to hold out, and so it fell over almost immediately. Wrong workers and wrong clients.
It may not have worked to the extent that Lewis Hamilton wished, but I would still consider it a victory for him.
Look at how English sport is prostrating itself at the BLM altar. Premiership soccer is practically a BLM religious ceremony with a bit of football.
The fact is that this BLM orchestrated hysteria has achieved far more in the last month than race hustlers and hard left social justice warriors would dared to have dreamed this time last year
I wish it were otherwise, but I doubt the existence of the much-vaunted silent, sensible majority which rejects all of this. It may be that such a majority exists in the over 50s, but this poison has been rife in youth popular culture and education for so long, that it has succeeded.
I’m still waiting for Britain’s richest sportsman to explain if he is kneeling out of empathy with his hideously oppressed black side or as an apology for the inherited guilt of his white side.
Stop the world – there’s an awful lot of idiots that need to be thrown off.
Charles Moore’s comparison to the print unions is interesting, potentially even heartening.
It took a certain amount in the seventies for the British electorate to get it. If Callaghan had called an election in 1978 he would have won, despite everything that had befallen Britain in the decade before. Post winter of discontent some surprising people voted Tory.
What does fascinate me is how reluctant people on the squishy left are to admit the value of the supply side reforms of the eighties, while nonetheless not really wanting them to be rolled back.
With a handful of exceptions, lefty journalists spent years demonising Murdoch and Thatcher, while benefiting from the world they created at Wapping. I always wonder if the metropolitan left’s slobbering over the EU is partly a consequence of their inability to admit that the post-war consensus was a disastrous failure, and its abandonment a success.
If history does repeat itself, I can see a scenario where the majority of people get so sick of this rubbish that they give a mandate to someone nasty and purposeful enough to sort it out.* This person (or people) will be tacitly – and only tacitly – supported by the “liberal” institutions that are now overrun.
The problem is that even in this situation things will have to get even worse than they have now. Things and institutions that took many years to build up will be broken in a moment; it won’t be at all easy to put them back together.
* I see no evidence that this is Trump. Sorry.
Stop the world – there’s an awful lot of idiots that need to be thrown off.
Ooooohhhh, my, my, my, noooo . . .
What one does is to very carefully sort them into assorted groups, and then very carefully feed each group into the next . . . .
And as they insistently slaughter each other, one can continue to enjoy the continuing world . . . .
It’s heaven when you…find snark on the menu…
“I imagine the Hungarian crowd will be less than interested in their kneeling to BLM.”
There won’t be a crowd, thanks to the Chinese Bat AIDS. But yes, you’re probably right. If there had been, their reaction would have been interesting.
Anyway, I’ve recently been re-reading (bits of) Booker & North’s Scared to Death. I can’t imagine why it seemed relevant right now. This, in the Epilogue, jumped out at me as oddly contemporary:
(My emphasis.) This stuff has been brewing for a while, and I don’t think it started with ill-educated “snowflake” millennials unused to criticism. They’re following a lead that was already set for them.
It’s heaven when you…find snark on the menu…
A number of years back I noted the likelihood of the California Cuisine five bean salad, consisting of One bean, two bean, three bean, four bean, and bean number five, probable charge of seventy-five dollars, plus corkage fee.
… Aaaand it’s reported that some drivers “controversially” chose not to take the knee at the Hungarian GP. That’s an interesting way of putting it, I think.
Speaking of Black Lives Matter.
“White vaginas and white penises jeopardise your melanin.”
Not all racists wear hoods
I’ve never fucked the black off a woman, and never even thought it possible, but now I am tempted to try. Scientific inquiry, of course.
Not all racists wear hoods
I’ll go farther and say that most racists in America are black.
“White vaginas and white penises jeopardise your melanin.”
Not all racists wear hoods
Especially not if they have seen a mohel…
I’m always genuinely surprised by how many people downplay or dismiss it’s significance and relegate it to a side-show of little importance.
[long list of various spectacles omitted for brevity]
Yes, and lots of people paid attention when a dentist shot a lion, too.
What actually changed, though?
Is games journalism any more “ethical” than it was prior to GamerGate? (trick question. There’s never been any ethics or journalism in “game journalism”; that canard was the most ridiculous claim to come out of GG)
Are games any less “woke”? Are they any more woke?
Was Anita Sarkeesian financially ruined, her reputation in tatters? Did she end up having any influence on the game industry beyond a temporary sinecure at a nonentity of a game studio?
Did Carl Benjamin run for parliament on a GamerGate platform, or was it because he became involved with UKIP, like many other Leave campaigners? If it was Gamergate, how does that explain Mark Meecham, who had no real connection to GG?
You’ve successfully demonstrated that The Internet lost its collective sh*t over GamerGate. The Internet lost its sh*t over Cecil the Lion, Harambe the gorilla, and a blue and/or yellow dress, too.
What actually changed as a result of GamerGate?
(trick question. There’s never been any ethics or journalism in “game journalism”; that canard was the most ridiculous claim to come out of GG)
Do you mean that “games journalism” is almost entirely marketing pretending to be journalism? I never paid much attention.
“White vaginas and white penises jeopardise your melanin.”
I was rather amused by that rant – ill-judged as it was, it could be pretty much done verbatim in, say, a Key and Peele sketch and played for laughs.