I love Kickstarter. I think that’s clear to people who know me by now? I love it. There’s a dude named Brad Muir and he works at Double Fine and I love the games they make, so much. But before Kickstarter, every time a Double Fine game came out I was a little worried it would be their last, and I’d have to worry that if people didn’t buy it, who knows what would happen to that studio. Then they found KIckstarter and now they make games and people like me can front load the development cost for them and it is the absolute best arrangement for creative people who want a tool in the exhausting struggle of art + commerce. A friend of mine is taking a month off her job to write a children’s book because of this platform. It’s GREAT. I love it.
The outcome of this is that I spend a lot of time just browsing Kickstarter looking for something cool to either back or crow about online. I don’t really back much - I don’t have a ton of capitol to toss around, and I’m sure the fact that I have a lot of ideas and no money factors into my love of a platform that gives money to people with ideas - but I like to check it out. So tonight, I found THIS fucking thing.
This is a nightmare.
Watching the video, reading the description, it sounds fairly innocent but a little eye-roll inducing. It’s another book where some nerd, desperate to be liked by women (this is not an insult, we are ALL desperate to be liked by someone we want to have sex with) thinks he’s figured out some cheat code or check-list like routine they can run in a bar to make women sleep with them, as if women aren’t people but a series of subroutines or an obstacle course that they can optimize to get their dick wet as fast as possible. And he’s written that advice down! And he’s selling it! To you! You could learn his cheat codes. This is nothing new for the internet. In fact, a large swath of this book was published already on Reddit. What’s new is that he’s crowdfunding it.And sure, you might think this is sad or dumb or that this guy is just another lonely dude talking to other lonely dudes who’ll head out into the night with their fedoras to failure, right? Not a big deal? Oops, turns out we’re wrong, because here are some excerpts from what he’s already put on Reddit -
”5) Get CLOSE to her, damn it!To quote Rob Judge, “Personal space is for pussies.” I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can’t keep their hands off of women. Well you’re not gonna be able to do that if you aren’t in close! ”
“All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically.”
“Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.”
“Sex
Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.”
- Source
SO. Now I am no longer rolling my eyes.
This guy is no longer just being weird and creepy on the internet. Now he’s writing a book about how to sexually assault women, and he is using something I believe in (Kickstarter) to ask YOU for money to do it. I am offended as someone who believes in the platform, and more importantly I am offended as someone who believes women shouldn’t be treated this way, and that people who say otherwise CERTAINLY should not profit off saying they should.
This isn’t harmless. People come to these boards because they are scared of being humiliated, and they are saying to the world, “Tell me what to do, because I don’t know what to do.” And this guy has chosen to tell them, “You should be a rapist.”
There’s largely nothing we can do about people saying this shit on a place like Reddit - Reddit’s a mess for another time - but let’s get it off of Kickstarter. The project is funded in 10 hours - and unfortunately a lot of those are sleeping hours - but PLEASE report it to Kickstarter, please tweet @Kickstarter asking them to take it down, and PLEASE do not let something cool be used for the UGLIEST thing imaginable.
The Kickstarter - Report Button is on the bottom of the page
Please Tweet at @Kickstarter
Casey
YO EVERY BODY FUCKING REPORT THIS KICKSTARTER
June 2013
Malinda Lo (via arcadiaego)
#yeah i think straight ppl sometimes assume the world can be sorted into homophobes and queer allies #which no it isn’t that fucking simple #and it’s a really dangerous assumption to make b/c you can support equal marriage and have queer friends and queer relatives #and yet still perpetuate heteronormative ideals on a daily fucking basis (via electricskeptic)
I’m having a lot of feelings about how I reblog so many posts that talk about men and women which don’t so much as throw in a, “also non-binary people exist, but I don’t know enough about the ways* they navigate patriarchy to comment.” I’m unsettled by how easily I’ll ignore my own erasure. I usually don’t say anything, because I’m afraid of ~nitpicking~ an “important” post with my own ~petty~ issues, because I’ve been taught so well that my issues are petty and that I shouldn’t say anything, because then they might stop humouring me with my ungrammatical pronouns and tell me that I should just shut up because non-binary genders aren’t really real.
*Plural used because there is not one monolithic experience of being non-binary and the ways we navigate patriarchy vary vastly depending on a number of factors
I don’t care about your feelings of confusion around my gender.
I don’t care about your armchair gender theory, where you tell me how we should “do away with gender” without proposing any solutions to existing oppressive structures.
I don’t care that your gay friend, or even your white trans man friend, used the term “tranny,” you don’t know the effect of that word and have no right to “reclaim” it.
I don’t care when you tell me about how you saw this really fucked up transphobic/transmisogynist thing. Don’t tell me, I know it exists and it’s pervasive. This applies to any intersection of oppression I may inhabit. What I want to hear is what you DID about it in that moment. Otherwise, see my previous lack of caring.
I don’t care about being your go-to “call out” person on all things trans*. If you are my ally, my friend, our relationship has to be more than me calling you out. Putting the onus on me to identify when I need to call you out is exactly the kind of pressure allies are supposed to relieve. Friends get angry with each other, and that is how friendship is tested and understanding is built.
- I care about a lot of things, and that list is far longer. This list itself is in fact an expression of care, a care for myself. Be my ally, wholly and truly in that struggle.
[A/N: presented this as part of my allyship workshop at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference. People seemed to enjoy it and someone asked me for a copy, so here it is for anyone else interested. -Brynn Cassidy (Cass)]
yes yes yes yes this
i finally added a donation button to my page
medical bills are piling up
help if you can
muchos gracias
Things that are creepy:
- Persistence after someone has said NO or STOP, or has made it clear they are not interested in your advances
- Invalidating someone’s “no”
- Only stopping your advances when somebody informs you they are taken (you are telling this person their “no” alone is not enough, which means you do not respect them)
- Asking “why” when somebody rejects your advances
- Asking “why not” when somebody refuses to give you their phone number
- men get into something not aimed at their gender: get special titles like "brony." recognition by creators. heralded for defying gender appeal. get documentary.
- women get into something not aimed at their gender: not real fans. probably secret friend zone warriors deadset on erasing men from the human race. get insulting demeaning memes and sexual harassment.
Next time I hear yet another remark about an Artist of Color’s ego (notably, they are almost always Black), I’m gonna make posters with these statements from Adele about how she wants to “buy a gun and open fire” because she has to pay so much in taxes:
I’m mortified to have to pay 50%! [While] I use the NHS, I can’t use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.
How quickly we forget about this but oh, Kanye releases a new album? OMG HIS EGO! Jay Z has some new deal or other? THAT EGO! Beyonce uses a gimmicky monicker for her tour, like Queen? THAT WOMAN’S EGO IS OUT OF CONTROL! Rihanna does some marketing stunt involving a plane and music journalists? BRING HER DOWN A NOTCH! HER EGO IS OFFENSIVE!
Adele exploits her image as “every White woman” while wishing she could open fire because her exceptional wealth is taxed accordingly? well, doesn’t she look lovely in lace? If it had been Rihanna making this statement two years ago, we would have never heard the end of it.
Last week it was Kanye’s ego with the new album, today it’s Jay Z’ deal announced last night. Like clockwork, the media machine is back in the business of putting them all in their places…
GUISE
GUISE
IF YOU HIT “X+C” IT SHUTS OFF EVERY GIF ON YOUR DASH
EVERY SINGLE ONE TURNS TO A LITTLE GREY BOX WITH A LOCK
GUISE
TUMBLR HAS MADE ITSELF SAFE FOR EPILEPTICS
PASS IT ON
YOU DID A GOOD THING STAFF
FINALLY
THANK
this is NOT TRUE (see the OP’s sidebar) if you have missing e, X+C is the hotkey to turn on safedash MAYBE that function of missing e still works, maybe not, and if you don’t have it it won’t work anyway XKIT does have a similar safedash feature; unfortunately, this DOES NOT specifically disable animated gifs, it disables all images (mousing over an image unhides it, but there’s no way to tell in advance whether it’s animated or not) I believe there are browser extensions that stop gifs from automatically running, those might be worth looking into this DOES NOT WORK though
Firefox you don’t need an extension for (you can change image.animation_mode on the about:config screen to “none” to disable them)—though there might be extensions to better turn them on and off—and the Chrome extension, unless its changed, pauses gifs after the page has fully loaded which. Yeah obvious flaw is obvious.
Thanks!
‘hi i haven’t talked to you in five weeks but we’re still best friends’: a story about me and human interaction.
Aquaria is a glorious exploration-centric Castlevania-esque indie game. It has a lot of points in its favor, one of them being that a good chunk of the characters (few of them though there are) are female. Including the protagonist. Cookie for the devs, yeah?
I was browsing around for mods one…
And it would have been so fucking simple not to gender the difficulty-turner-downer! All they had to say was *anything but that.*
At some other point, I may want to talk about the “girls dislike combat or difficulty in games” thing, though. Because, in my limited and not representative sample, I know an awful lot of lady gamers who fit that one and relatively few who don’t. Basically, my question is this: at what point is a harmful stereotype “true enough” that it’s worth designing around? Is it patronizing, or merely kind and accodomating, to do so?
Lastly, Aquaria is a really good game and people should play it, dev shittery notwithstanding. I picked it up as part of a Bundle ages ago and was really taken with it.I look forward to the post/article on the lady gamers and preference for toned-down difficulty when it comes about! I’ve never run into a correlation myself (the closest I’ve come is a relative dearth of women who like FPSs but can, say, murder the shit out of Shin Megami Tensei bosses, which gets translated by misogynistic assholes into, “GIRLS DON’T LIKE HARD GAMES,” because anything that doesn’t try to be a white western dude’s power fantasy doesn’t count in their eyes), so alternate perspectives are good to hear when not from misogynistic nerdbros.
ETA: Oh, but I don’t think it’s a stereotype that needs to be worked around, no matter how true it is. Most games these days come with difficulty settings, either easy/medium/hard/some-sort-of-unlockable-supermode or sliders. And while there are some super hard games that don’t make any such allowances, there are also super easy ones. The hard game gamers can continue to enjoy their hard games, the folks who prefer easier ones can go with those. Gender correlations seem irrelevant when it comes down to game design on that front.
What’s worse to me, actually, is the implicit assumption that anyone reading that post will be a straight man. The waaaaaaay-too-common problem, usually from white men, who think ‘talking to a person’ and translate that to ‘talking to a white straight man,’ that totally taken-for-granted bullshit.
It also sours the whole sound of the game for me: it’s not just a game with a female protagonist, it’s a game with a female protagonist that was made by people with the implicit assumption that men are their audience. Which COMPLETELY changes the dynamic; e.g. Tomb Raider.
Anyway, I want to talk about the difficulty thing too, ‘cause it’s pretty ludicrous. Like, when reading that at first, especially when it’s put something like “girls who prefer story to combat in games” - I count myself in that group before realizing, wait, the whole way that’s set up is bullshit. My favorite games are ROGUELIKES and DWARF FORTRESS, for fuck’s sake; not exactly known for easy difficulty! I like incredibly complex systems that I can take my time to mess around with and min-max - not for munchkinly reasons so much as I just actually find the systematizing really fun.
And while I do find myself in many games seeing the combat as an annoyance distracting from the story, that’s not because I ~don’t like combat in games,~ it’s because those games have AWFUL combat gameplay which I tolerate only if the game’s narrative can carry it. I mean, sorry to Remember Me, which I loved - but I didn’t play it for the s-pressen combo system. KOTOR was a formative game for me when I was younger, but lbh, all I remember of the combat was chaining Master Flurry over and over for maximum efficiency, the combat was awful. I don’t actually dislike combat in games, but I have very strict standards for how good the gameplay has to be.
So where is this ACTUALLY coming from? I think it boils down very similarly to the “fake girl gamers!” trend, really. What meets the standard for real games, for difficult games, is a hazy, vague standard, and the goalposts are moved constantly by dudebros with little regard for any actual quality other than how male-dominated it is. So, naturally, that’s the result we get. It even seems natural at first to agree, like I did, until I noticed that I was still going off the implicit assumption that hardcore, combat-oriented games meant ‘games exclusively tailored to cater specifically to male power fantasies and hypermasculinity,’ because honestly that is all that they really mean. Yeah, games that are the most heavily tailored to appeal specifically to men’s socialization are less popular with women? It’s really just a tautology though, and its only real function is to serve misogyny.
(Incidentally, I’d also wager that most people in general play games on lower difficulty settings, and that there’s not huge gender variance there, although stereotype threat probably does impact it. Competitiveness being valued in men, and being devalued in women, also effects how much you’ll hear about it - especially since the myth of ‘fake gamer girls’ gets you instantly derided if you’re a woman who does boast about her gaming prowess.)
I….
Aquaria????
The game where the woman kills more gods than Kratos (using singing and cooking) and the male love interest is basically useless?????
The hell.
(Also I’m not entirely clear if the mod in question was a 3rd party thing orr…???)
Anyway I think most of what I’d say has been said, although it’s worth noting hardcore gaming also takes practice so if there’s less women involved in it it could easily be because the games and communities tend to be SUPER ALIENATING so nobody ever picks up the initial skillset where Hard is fun and not painful and full of save scumming and repetive rerolls. Like most people who prefer harder games have probably been doing it since they were like… six.
(whereas casual games frequently are marketed TO women specifically so you develop the skills to make playing those fun more readily.)
Also as far as preferring story to combat in games most games are absolutely terrible at making those two go together well (like say, EVERY BIOWARE GAME EVER) so really I’m not sure how much that really says about demographics so much as that most major games are completely clueless about how to make GAMES into stories. (Like Remember Me and the new Tomb Raider come to mind in that they’re BASICALLY movies, not games.)
GUISE
GUISE
IF YOU HIT “X+C” IT SHUTS OFF EVERY GIF ON YOUR DASH
EVERY SINGLE ONE TURNS TO A LITTLE GREY BOX WITH A LOCK
GUISE
TUMBLR HAS MADE ITSELF SAFE FOR EPILEPTICS
PASS IT ON
YOU DID A GOOD THING STAFF
FINALLY
THANK
this is NOT TRUE (see the OP’s sidebar) if you have missing e, X+C is the hotkey to turn on safedash MAYBE that function of missing e still works, maybe not, and if you don’t have it it won’t work anyway XKIT does have a similar safedash feature; unfortunately, this DOES NOT specifically disable animated gifs, it disables all images (mousing over an image unhides it, but there’s no way to tell in advance whether it’s animated or not) I believe there are browser extensions that stop gifs from automatically running, those might be worth looking into this DOES NOT WORK though
pro tip: going through therapy can be an exhausting, draining process, especially if you need to work through trauma
so aside from being expensive if you don’t have excellent health insurance or full coverage from medicaid or charity care,
some people don’t have the mental strength at the moment to work through situations in their past that were extremely traumatic (wow who would have thought)
some people are in abusive situations where it is unsafe for them to seek help
if someone, for whatever reason, tells you that they are not able to get therapy after you suggest it, it’s usually a pretty good reason, and you should drop the issue.
Also some people have had bad experiences with therapy that make them unable to trust therapists or seek help from them.
very important addition!
Aquaria is a glorious exploration-centric Castlevania-esque indie game. It has a lot of points in its favor, one of them being that a good chunk of the characters (few of them though there are) are female. Including the protagonist. Cookie for the devs, yeah?
I was browsing around for mods one…
And it would have been so fucking simple not to gender the difficulty-turner-downer! All they had to say was *anything but that.*
At some other point, I may want to talk about the “girls dislike combat or difficulty in games” thing, though. Because, in my limited and not representative sample, I know an awful lot of lady gamers who fit that one and relatively few who don’t. Basically, my question is this: at what point is a harmful stereotype “true enough” that it’s worth designing around? Is it patronizing, or merely kind and accodomating, to do so?
Lastly, Aquaria is a really good game and people should play it, dev shittery notwithstanding. I picked it up as part of a Bundle ages ago and was really taken with it.I look forward to the post/article on the lady gamers and preference for toned-down difficulty when it comes about! I’ve never run into a correlation myself (the closest I’ve come is a relative dearth of women who like FPSs but can, say, murder the shit out of Shin Megami Tensei bosses, which gets translated by misogynistic assholes into, “GIRLS DON’T LIKE HARD GAMES,” because anything that doesn’t try to be a white western dude’s power fantasy doesn’t count in their eyes), so alternate perspectives are good to hear when not from misogynistic nerdbros.
ETA: Oh, but I don’t think it’s a stereotype that needs to be worked around, no matter how true it is. Most games these days come with difficulty settings, either easy/medium/hard/some-sort-of-unlockable-supermode or sliders. And while there are some super hard games that don’t make any such allowances, there are also super easy ones. The hard game gamers can continue to enjoy their hard games, the folks who prefer easier ones can go with those. Gender correlations seem irrelevant when it comes down to game design on that front.
What’s worse to me, actually, is the implicit assumption that anyone reading that post will be a straight man. The waaaaaaay-too-common problem, usually from white men, who think ‘talking to a person’ and translate that to ‘talking to a white straight man,’ that totally taken-for-granted bullshit.
It also sours the whole sound of the game for me: it’s not just a game with a female protagonist, it’s a game with a female protagonist that was made by people with the implicit assumption that men are their audience. Which COMPLETELY changes the dynamic; e.g. Tomb Raider.
[ETA: OHHHH it was the maker of the MOD, not a maker of the GAME, who said that! okay good, that makes me feel way more comfortable about the game proper :) Thanks for pointing that out, Emily!]
Anyway, I want to talk about the difficulty thing too, ‘cause it’s pretty ludicrous. Like, when reading that at first, especially when it’s put something like “girls who prefer story to combat in games” - I count myself in that group before realizing, wait, the whole way that’s set up is bullshit. My favorite games are ROGUELIKES and DWARF FORTRESS, for fuck’s sake; not exactly known for easy difficulty! I like incredibly complex systems that I can take my time to mess around with and min-max - not for munchkinly reasons so much as I just actually find the systematizing really fun.
And while I do find myself in many games seeing the combat as an annoyance distracting from the story, that’s not because I ~don’t like combat in games,~ it’s because those games have AWFUL combat gameplay which I tolerate only if the game’s narrative can carry it. I mean, sorry to Remember Me, which I loved - but I didn’t play it for the s-pressen combo system. KOTOR was a formative game for me when I was younger, but lbh, all I remember of the combat was chaining Master Flurry over and over for maximum efficiency, the combat was awful. I don’t actually dislike combat in games, but I have very strict standards for how good the gameplay has to be.
So where is this ACTUALLY coming from? I think it boils down very similarly to the “fake girl gamers!” trend, really. What meets the standard for real games, for difficult games, is a hazy, vague standard, and the goalposts are moved constantly by dudebros with little regard for any actual quality other than how male-dominated it is. So, naturally, that’s the result we get. It even seems natural at first to agree, like I did, until I noticed that I was still going off the implicit assumption that hardcore, combat-oriented games meant ‘games exclusively tailored to cater specifically to male power fantasies and hypermasculinity,’ because honestly that is all that they really mean. Yeah, games that are the most heavily tailored to appeal specifically to men’s socialization are less popular with women? It’s really just a tautology though, and its only real function is to serve misogyny.
(Incidentally, I’d also wager that most people in general play games on lower difficulty settings, and that there’s not huge gender variance there, although stereotype threat probably does impact it. Competitiveness being valued in men, and being devalued in women, also effects how much you’ll hear about it - especially since the myth of ‘fake gamer girls’ gets you instantly derided if you’re a woman who does boast about her gaming prowess.)
- Me: I won't let it bother me I won't let it bother me I won't let it bother me
- Me: *lays down to sleep at night*
- Me: It bothers me, actually it really fucking bothers me, so let's lay here and think and stress about it instead of sleeping
I Was Going to Reblog That Post Until I Saw Who Wrote It, The Musical.
I Wish Someone Else Would Make That Point Because Oh My God I Loathe You: The Memoir
I’d Follow You But You Reblog Regularly From Someone I Hate, The Novel
Why Would You Talk to That Awful Person, I Thought You Were Quality: an Interpretive Dance
OK So We’ve Already Forgotten The Time That Person Was Really Shitty And I Feel Like I’m Gonna Get Jumped On For Pointing It Out: A Novel In Three Parts.
(◕‿◕✿) facts about divorce for feminists and MRAs:
- in most (51%) of cases, both parents decided on their own (out of court) that the mother was to receive full custody
- in 29% of custody cases, the decision was made without any third party involvement
- in 91% of cases, the decision for the mother to have custody was made without court involvement
- of those who go to court, 70% of men who seek custody of their child receive it
- of those 70%, 1/3 of the cases cited domestic abuse as part of the reason for divorce
- women who mention having been victims of domestic abuse in court are less likely to receive custody of their children than women who didn’t
i’m tired of seeing posts on feminism by both feminists and MRAs citing “gender bias in custody cases” as a problem we need to solve. women aren’t unfairly receiving custody more often. abusive men are unfairly receiving custody.
the fact is, if my dad had actually attended his court ordered anger management type classes, i would legally have been required to spend a portion of my time with him until i turned 18, even though he beat my mother and abused me.
don’t let anyone make you think that the scale isn’t still tipped toward men in a court of law.