PrimeJunta

True story: Prof. John Long discovers the invention of sex. It was a fish—or, presumably, two fish—of the species Microbrachius dïcki. Source: [ http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29661446 ]

It was funny to see some of these stereotypes in action when I was registering for residence here. There was a German guy repeatedly enquiring "Vat is ze standart procedure in zis case?" and a Dutch lady grousing about how expensive everything is, and a Brit who thought the whole thing was entirely unnecessary and rather beneath her dignity to have to do it in the first place.

Funny, every time I've been to Germany I've been struck by how friendly and helpful everyone is. Guess that says something about Finns.

That's why we go to all those exciting countries on vacation. Wouldn't want to live in most of 'em though.

I just moved to the #1 country on that list. (From the #7 country, so it's not that huge a leap.) Funny thing is, I'm thinking that there may be something to it. People do seem unreasonably happy here. We just went to a family gathering yesterday and compared to a similar affair in Finland everbody looked healthier, more fit, more relaxed, and generally better-adjusted. Trying to figure out why. Some things I believe I have observed: There's a lot of trust. It shows in simple things like a delivery man buzzing the door and leaving a big box of wine in the entrance, people mostly leaving their doors open, paying for stuff when you pick it up rather than when you order it, people leaving their dogs or babies outside the store when going in, kids talking to you to ask if they can pet the dog or where you're from, and so on. Also larger things, such as registering for residence going extremely straightforwardly with no documentation needed apart from showing the passport. Work-life balance. People work short hours, but they do it extremely intensively. Then they do what they do in their pastime equally intensively, and a lot of that is physical, outdoors activity—cycling, running, sailing or other watersport, and so on. Shows also as great attention to detail, with both physical objects and spaces, and processes very well thought-out. Flexibility. There are rules, but the Danes like to explain the why of the rules a lot, and many of them are written "flexibly." For example, not "Don't leave the path" but "The escarpment is vulnerable, please avoid going there." Basically this country is... reassuring. There's a feeling that things are set up so that you can minimize worrying about serious and tedious stuff and concentrate on fun or productive stuff. There's gotta be a scary downside to it, but I haven't figured it out yet. On the other hand, maybe it's the beer. Everybody drinks a lot of beer here. Somehow they manage not to keel over dead of acute alcoholism though, go figure.

Yeh, it is a bit of a sausage party, and the reasons are rather obvious.

In all fairness, the Codex does have Roguey. I think s/he has the most impressive collection of tags of all.

@Volourn I know that you're a Pretty Princess though.

@Zoraptor Interestingly the Codex has pretty damn strong social control of expression. You guys just do it more like the old-style Usenet way of giving the nonconformers a clown nose (read: dumbf**k or "possibly retarded" tag) and then poking them with sticks, and only banning them if that fails. There's a lot less room there for dissenting opinion there than on most other forums I've hung out on IMO. You just have a rather... eccentric set of norms you're enforcing, bless your hearts.

I've been trying out the different kinds of fish you get here in Denmark. There's a really good fishmonger nearby so I get it extremely fresh. They're not the same as in Finland although it's the same sea. I've especially liked the mackerel (fried, grilled in the oven, smoked), and cod. Yesterday we also had some crab claws. Boiled them in brine. Nice, but not as good as Pacific crab.

Awww, poor baby. Here, have a hug. {TrashMan}

There's an alternative to anonymity and real-name policy. Pseudonymity. You can build a lot of mechanisms on that. The question isn't really technical though, it's cultural. Stuff is tolerated on the Net that's not tolerated in any other space because freeze peach. That's changing too. As the Net is getting integrated into everyday life, norms from everyday life are changing the Net. For good and for ill. What most worries me actually is that the way things are currently set up, our gatekeepers will be corporations who don't give a spit about the political dimensions of what they do, only the bottom line. I don't want Apple or Twitter or Google or Facebook to be the arbiter and gatekeeper. We have to find something better. Edit: Or Obsidian Entertainment for that matter.

@TrueNeutral That's changing too. There's serious discussion going on about what the responsibility of media like Twitter and Facebook should be about genuinely antisocial behavior. It's clear the current system isn't working, and it's ultimately affecting them as well. There are solutions—technical, political, social, human—to that. Again, it'll be a while yet but it will happen. I remember the Usenet before spam. It was a pretty wild place, but there was—in some forums anyway—pretty effective social controls on genuinely destructive behavior. Get seriously out of line and you'd get "twitted" or "kooked," after which people would mostly just point and laugh at you. That won't work on an open forum like Twitter. Some other solution will have to be found, and as is the way of such things, it will. Edit: about that "it's not a normal person" thing. No, probably not. But that not-normal person felt encouraged and empowered by a horde of supporters. We're social primates. Social approval is really, really fundamental to what makes us tick. Would Anders Behring Breivik have shot up those kids if he hadn't had a validating echo chamber for his white supremacist, PUA, misogynist ideas? Would Elliot Rodger? Would any of those other spree killers? Somehow I don't think so. "Nuts" is not an explanation or an excuse, it's an observation. Nutcases go nuts for reasons, and go nuts in particular ways for other reasons. Going "hey whoa I've nothing to do with that" after consistently validating their delusions and egging them on is a pretty cheap cop-out. Same applies to anti-social stuff of lesser degrees than killing people of course. (Also gotta point out that people who are actually nuts—as in, have diagnosed psychiatric disorders—are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than people who don't.)

I am humbled to be mentioned in context with that king of the 'Thals. Sadly, a lowly melonhead here. Edit: Grimoire is a day 1 purchase, when it comes out. I'll be setting aside money from my pension for the purpose.

Wait, that's not what this thread is for? Crap. In that case I think I may have made a faux pas.

Cool. I'll match it for the Communists, then. (It'll have to be a local one though as donating to a foreign political party is bad form, if the CPUSA even accepts donations from abroad, or are allowed to.) @BruceVC: The Internet is serious business, don't you know?

@AlO3 Yeh. There's nothing particularly shocking about feminist criticism. There are feminist film, book, TV, and theater critics writing all the time, and nobody raises an eyebrow. Sarkeesian et al. are only notorious because they applied it to gaming. (And no, they're not the ONLY critics. They're not even the MAJORITY of critics. It's really childish to think Sarkeesian et al. want feminist criticism to be the ONLY criticism, let alone think that's ever going to happen.) It's a shame really that the manboons resorted to poo-slinging, because a good discussion could have been had. As it is, it's impossible to say anything on the topic in public, without it devolving into poo-slinging in no time flat.

@KaineParker Sorry, no. I don't support libertarianism, even of the Green variety.

@KaineParker Since you're so insistent... Donate up to $100 to these guys and I'll match it for your cause. Will need to see a receipt. I'll do that even though donations aren't tax-deductible where I come from, so it'll actually cost me more than you.

@JadedWolf thing is, nobody's saying that gaming really is the hobby of neckbeards. On the contrary, almost every MSM piece about this I've read has pointed out that gaming has gone mainstream. What they're saying is that gaming culture and discourse about games is dominated by neckbeards, and that largely for historical reasons, because at one point they really did form a much more significant chunk of the gamer and especially game author demographic. This has changed, and the neckbeards are screaming bloody murder. Zit. Popped. Seriously. There is no reasonable middle ground in this drama. There's entertainment value, especially as anyone can participate, like, say, adopting a role and posting on a thread on some forum somewhere, on one side or another.

@KaineParker Funny, and here I thought Texas has the highest horses of them all. Surely you haven't traded them in for ponies?

Ah. We were talking at cross-purposes, slightly. I was talking about the big picture, the cultural shift that's been going on for many years now and broke surface... perhaps with Sarkeesian's Kickstarter. GamerGate might very well "win" if by winning you mean succeed in getting some clueless corporations to pull advertising from some worthless media outlets or some speakers to cancel engagements, or even -- tragically -- ruin some lives. That's all entertaining and/or unpleasant, depending on how you look at it. What's far more important though is that the rest of the world has gotten a good look at what the culture that came up with GG really represents -- and has roundly rejected it. The troglodytes are now blinking in the sunlight, and their cave is being dug up. That's what counts. Edit: I plead guilty to misanthropy though. I do despise most people, on most days.

No. I do not feel any need to "be even" with you. That would be too big a step down.

@KainParker Ah. Texan. That is a valid excuse. Apologies and condolences, I did not realize that.

</trollmode> I've been following this scene for a looooong time. Since rec.games on Usenet in the '90's at least, and BBS's from before that. Things have changed, big-time. Games are no longer a weird nerdy niche thing. If someone asks what my hobbies are, I can list "games" without getting more than the very occasional weird look. (I never minded them, but I do notice the difference.) Games are reviewed in major mainstream press. There are shows about gaming on major mainstream TV. Competitive gaming is starting to be recognized as a sport. That means that the weird little bubble that is 'gamer culture' has popped. It's no longer safely insulated from the rest of the world. That means that the kind of raging, overt, and often entirely unconscious racism and sexism that's apparent even in this thread -- although probably not to many of the people who do it, having only been exposed to the kind of culture that has the same values -- no longer passes without comment. Anita Sarkeesian would not have been conceivable five or ten years ago. Five years ago, if someone who's not white, or a woman, said on a forum like this "You know, I'd like it if more women or people of color showed up in games, as protagonists and main characters instead of just tokens," she would have been (1) completely alone and (2) run out of town on a rail. Now? The violence of the backlash against her is stronger than ever, but only because the usual methods aren't working anymore. She's not completely alone: she has people chiming in and supporting her. When the backlash runs to the ridiculous extents it has in GG and with Sarkeesian, to name just two incidents, this makes mainstream news -- and they aren't buying the manboon story. These neckbeards with fedoras ranting about "misandry" are weird, and they never realized it because in the gamer bubble their views were, until now, hegemonic and unchallenged. For the past few years, they've had to face a real challenge to their ridiculous views, and like the manboons they are, they've only dug their hole deeper. There are about 17,000 people hating on Sarkeesian on Reddit. That's an insignificant fraction of the people who play games. It's that majority who matters. The KainParkers, Orogun1's, pseudonymi, and Meshuggers of this world are being squeezed into insignificance, clutching their fedoras and throwing this gigantic temper tantrum that we're seeing. It's a zit. It's being popped, and there's bloody pus all over the place. Sadly there are some real pathogens in there and I fervently hope nobody will actually get killed before this is over, but ultimately that's all that it is. A zit. Popped. A while longer, and gaming will meld into mainstream culture and will be regarded no differently from films, TV, or books. The weird isolated misogynistic bubble where anything goes because hey, Internet will be history. It's the same thing in the atheist and skeptic communities too, by the way -- too other hitherto unsullied preserves of white, nerdy men. All those women and people of color elbowing their way in, demanding representation on their own terms. Same discourse, same conflict, same ugliness, same dynamic... and same direction. It'll be a while yet. A few years, maybe. And it'll very likely get worse—superficially at least—before it gets better. But yes, we are winning. The manboons can't stop it, however much poo they sling and however hard they scream. And I'm enjoying every step of the way.