Granted it was during a bleak period of my life when I was so reactionary. But my god, to think these goobers are still around today, still doing racism and sexism, just moving from target to target to take out the impotent rage on.
Just reminded of it today with the "discourse" of Yasuke being in Ass Creed and G*mers changing any woman not white and waifish with AI.
Semi-unrelated but I suspect that almost no one actually dislikes Yasuke for historical reasons. He's a pretty well known figure associated with the most famous shogun to ever live. His existence is fairly well documented, and he shows up a lot in Japanese media too. I think most people with a passing interest in Japanese history will have heard of him at some point.
Maybe it's just because I'm older now than I was during Gamergate, but this new drama doesn't hold up under even gentle scrutiny.Yeah. Yasuke is actually a perfect pick for an AC character. Fascinating person where just enough is known, but plenty of questions to fill in the blanks with AC nonsense.
its why everytime someone comes to me saying its not an issue about race in a samurai game, I tell them did you complain William in Nioh 1 and its sequel Nioh 2 was an Irish Samurai. if they didnt, suprise you might actually be a racist, because Nioh being a Japanese developed game, also proves Japan doesnt give a shit about historical accuracy and what race a Samurai is, so you couldnt play the japan would be mad about it card.
well of course William's race is non-politicalSeriously though, thats the perfect example to point to to show that this is all bs. It's the exact same situation - non Japanese people who became samurai in rhe Sengoku era and each had close relationships with a shogun. They're both real so its not the dreaded "historical inaccuracy." Theres literally only one difference between Yasuke and William that is the reason they're throwing a fit about one and not the other
It's mainly due to a lot of GG styled ragebait videos of dudes grifting on how most people are engaged by negative shit, and nothing is more negative than being a middle aged reactionary upset about vidya games.
I was 12 in 2000. There were a lot of words that were "ok" to say back then that I regret having come out of my mouth.
The important thing is to move on and learn why that was bad. Don't beat yourself up over it.
There were a lot of words that were "ok" to say back then
"There are two words I don't want to hear anybody say. 'Sucks' and 'Shut up'."
-my elementary school principal, in a very real and very serious assembly
One of my "friends" taught me a slur in 4th grade and it made the teacher think my parents were racists lol
If you're reformed and now on Hexbear, fuck you, Jay!Around the same grade, a friend said to me "you know why everything costs $##.99? It's called the Jewish dollar, cuz they're cheap"
I didn't know the stereotypes but learned there.
Similar to being introduced to the word gay by it being hurled at me as an insult while on the bus, didn't know what it meant but knew I didn't want to be that
We had a kid on our elementary school playground that had older brothers who told him about all the "bad stuff". He would hold court as we could sit around him and learn all the bad words for lgbtq people, the subtle differences between a blowjob and a "hummer", all the made up sex things like "rusty trombones" and whatnot.
That Kid turned out really weird. Hope he's doing ok out there.
Suckiest Bunch Of Sucks is the only thing that comes to mind after something like that
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
There were a lot of words that were "ok" to say back then that I regret
The amount that I used the r-slur in high school...That's not an american football game, that's the setup to a gay porno!
Oh jeez. I remember that. I was a large, overweight kid who was bad at sports. I was given the ball a lot.
A lot of us did. But look at us now! I'm proud of anyone who realized that was wrong and changed their behavior. Too many people double down on "it's just words bro" or "it didn't used to mean that. It just meant dumb".
True, main thing is I was just a kid and saw other people used it, did not think critically...
It should have been dismissed at the start, like game journalism on the whole is just copy paste press release, 9/10 reviews, attend cons.
But some mild feminist critique somehow turns into a movement???
i was suxked up into it briefly in its heyday when i was 14-15. I think people today might underestimate how persuasive it was to tween/teen boys (I didn't know
) in that phase after they've divested themselves from their parent's opinions but before they've had the chance to independently develop their own (inasmuch as one can opinions can be "independent" in society).EVERYBODY knew games journalism as an industry was a joke— 10/10 IGN, 7/10 too much water, Skyrim with Guns, and so forth — so a "movement" claiming to be concerned about ethics in games journalism was inviting as a 14 year old dweeb with nothing better to care about.
And once you've swallowed the hook with a few alt-lite zingers from "Based Milo" Yianopaulos and Christina Sommers it's easy to accept the rest of the reactionary rhetoric that builds on it—if games journalism was being ruined by liberal pansy feminists, then all the other stuff they were being blamed for must be their fault, right? I watched PragerU videos of my own volition (
) because YouTube recommended them and they built on the GamerGate stuff by offering easy answers that demanded nothing from me.Honestly its a miracle I wasn't completely lost to online alt-right brainrot. I don't even know why I stopped believing in it, I just... did? Then I spent like a year being a generic lib before finding r/cth and beginning my slow ascent to smug communist superiority
All this to say, don't be too hard on yourself for getting sucked into something. And as someone once said, if you don't look back at yourself and cringe, you haven't grown
Show
I think the reason I stopped believing in it is because i eventually noticed that everyone selling it gave off such pathetic/rancid vibes
i love finding more fellow 'reactionary teen to trans communist' pipeline comrades
The best thing about the whole to me was that it showed how reactionary most g*mers are, and it soured me forever on being in any video game related online spaces unless they explicitly don't allow reactionaries.
The other day I logged onto my private server for FFXI and I saw someone with the username "didyouassumemygender" and I was like "great"
I've noticed if a private server is geared towards "hardcore" players like old FFXI ones are you going to meet more G*mer reactionaries. I play on CatsEyeXI which is super casual and even still.
I think the most overt name I saw was in planetside 2: "fashygoy88"
Gotta say, I mostly view incels with pity. Like, if the demiurge isn't real, they've created it and made it their god. : (
Agreed. I've got this saying; "Always compassion, never mercy". I can recognize that many, probably most of our enemies didn't start out as bad people, they were made that way by circumstance. But the solution is to change the circumstance, and that's going to involve breaking a considerable number of eggs. I've said in the past that we're fighting to save the Fascists, too. Not the fascists as they are now, but the children who should have had a chance to not become fascists. In a sense we, like we meaning every person struggling for a better world back to the days we were yelling at each other in trees, failed those children. And we owe it to those children who were beaten in to fascists to fight to make sure others don't suffer the same fate. idk, I guess it's kind of abstract and weird, but I feel the goal of socialism, of communism, is to save everyone if we can, and I think part of that is that we can save people from becoming fash, too. Idk, I guess I'm just ranting now.
"Always compassion, never mercy"
That's brilliant, and incredibly useful. I'm going to remember that.
It's deeply sad and pathetic to me that other people my age are still posting on 4chan like they're 12 and just learned some racial slurs. And have now morphed into being "anti-woke" instead of "anti-sjw" when its all the same.
It is, it's the same shit shit just new lingo. It went from anti-feminism to anti-sjw to anti-woke now to anti-dei, just new buzzwords for the same old hatred of women and minorities.
At one point, I personally identified as an Anti-feminist. It was over a decade ago, of course, but it brings me great shame. I never considered myself conservative, I have genuine fascists in my family and never fully aligned with any of them, but I was a deeply reactionary liberal. I fell down that pipeline and nearly tumbled down the alt-right, but thankfully stopped at "classical liberalism." Please, feel free to laugh at my former self, he was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) a supreme dumbass of the highest order of magnitude, and should be laughed at.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
What I am trying to say, is that we are the sums of our trajectories. It's the Dialectic at work! We contain within ourselves the next version. Politzer puts Dialectical Materialism very beautifully in Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and I truly believe it helped me shed my self-hatred for being so reactionary for so long, as it was a necessary step considering my own personal Material Conditions that led to the me of today.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future.
Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.
This was my trajectory too. I went through a lot of rehabs and psych ward visits for my alcoholism that radicalized me and allowed me the chance to meet people very different from myself.
I truly believe it's the best path to deprogramming people. Exposure works. It's easy to dehumanize others until you work and study alongside them, until they become just as human as you.
It's also a major factor for anti-immigrant rhetoric and redlining, to keep that fascism festering.
I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future
I tell myself this all the time. You should always be able to look back ten years and be like "what was I thinking??" It shows growth, and it shows you won't ever stop working on yourself. Anyone born in the U.S. that has taken our path knows how much unlearning you have to do in life.
It's funny to me how all the "anti-feminist/anti-SJW classical liberals" from that era have faded away, because even if those guys didn't realize it, the whole anti-feminism/SJW thing was just a stepping stone towards fascism and now the real thing has overthrown it.
I guess it's not really funny as much as it is terrifying, but it's still kinda funny to me how irrelevant people like Thunderf00t and Amazing Atheist are now, because they were assholes.
I still don't know what gamergate was and I have no interest in learning. I feel like it would just be a complete waste of time. I think it had something to do with a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such?
a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such
that's a pretty accurate summary
every time you mention Dan Olson some reactionary chud comes out of the woodwork to say "umm you mean the guy that posted CP on 8kun?" oh shut the fuck up you lying sack of shit.
For real? I don’t think I’ve noticed that so far, though it wouldn’t surprise me. Dan’s been styling on chuds for a long time. I suspect his reading of fight club as a feminist critique of toxic masculinity left a core trauma for some of these bozos
during gamergate he wrote a piece on how there were literal CP boards on 8kun and the mods did nothing, and that pissed off chuds. so first they said his article itself constitutes spreading CP, his downloading of the images makes him a pedo, and then just straight up accused him of being the person that uploaded the CP in the first place to get 8kun shut down.
they're still really butt hurt about it. and let me just say i wish dan succeeded because 8kun was the breeding ground for Qanon.
Even dumber than that, it was kicked off by a jilted boyfriend who aired out their dirty laundry on Tumblr and the whole discourse centered around how women keep getting a pass for everything.
But yeah, life is too short and precious to spend any of it caring about gamergate.
I think it had something to do with a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such?
That's as good an explanation as you're going to find about it. Far right operatives latched onto them and juiced it up which is why it wouldn't go away
Self-cringe is the cost of personal growth. I am happy to pay it, and I'm glad you do too.
I was never into GG (too old for the target demo I think) but I spent entirely too much time doing the Reddit civility fetish debate bro shit back then.
I remember seeing a bunch of the discourse around gamers being an ostracized identity that overlapped with nerds as a target for bullying, and sympathizing with this. I also remember thinking "how the hell does this play out by being exclusionary to women who work in the games industry".
Yeah, I used to be really into the g*mergate/anti-sjw side of youtube back when I was a teenager. Now I'm a queer neurodivergent communist
exactly, theres something to be said about how many of us know somethings wrong with liberalism, but cannot pinpoint it exactly. Of course since the largest voice on our easiest to reach media is far right, we'd stumble down that for a bit. within a short while, it just gets more and more absurd, seeming just as wrong as liberalism. That is where marxism comes in.
then you're trans
The cool thing about being wrong is that it means you're still growing and alive.
We should do a watch of the original Stepford Wives. It's a really well done horror thriller that's still pretty damn relevant. Also a good time capsule of the white middle class feminism of the 70s that was often criticized at the time by more intersectional feminisms.
I think Gamergate was what made me, a slightly reactionary "lol those crazy SJWs" type at the time, throw my hands up and say "this is dork shit, who cares"
