Interesting Links – November 23, 2014

When I wrote my post about Slither, I mentioned that I wasn’t a great fan of the zombie genre, mostly because the zombies themselves are rarely the real threat.  Most zombie stories – indeed, most “apocalypse” stories in general – are about what happens when civilization is stripped away.  90+% of the time, the answer to that is chaos.  Only the most brutal and violent survive, and they take what they want from the soft and civilized, because that is the true nature of humanity.  We are the monsters.

Except that we never would have invented civilization in the first place if that were really our nature.

Cracked makes that point in greater depth in:

4 Reasons ‘The Walking Dead ‘ Hates Humans More Than Zombies

(Incidentally, if you want to read their classic article about why a zombie outbreak would never become an “apocalypse” in the first place, check it out here.  I love World War Z as much as anyone, but Max Brooks had to cheat like hell to make his collapse plausible, and he’s more honest and skillful than most.)

As long as you’re at Cracked, check out 28 Celebrities With Amazing Secret Talents, because people are never limited to what you know about them, and it would be nice to have some of those surprises be non-horrible for once.  I was particularly surprised and impressed by Johnny Cash and Flavor Flav.

Next up is our next installment of The Horrors of It All.  Once again, it’s a double feature: The Thing That Devoured A Planet/It Came From Beneath The Earth.  The first makes an utter hash of the Theory of Relativity, but it makes a good cosmic horror story nonetheless.  The second is just the kind of goofy fun that those old horror comics loved.

And now, last but not least:

Have you ever heard of Vivian James?

She’s the mascot of #Gamergate.  She’s supposed to represent the perfect gaming girl, the kind that isn’t interested in all this inclusivity and representation bullshit, she just wants to play Vidya Games (see where she got her name?).  Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes (though it seems odd to think that using a fictional female mouthpiece will somehow make the horrible things you do to real women okay), but #Gamergaters being the kind of people they are, it was about five seconds before they took this character, who they often spoke of with doting affection as their daughter, and started making porn of her.  Hell, even in the original version (the green and purple one), her clothing is a reference to an obscure 4chan rape joke.

It wasn’t long before we white knights and Social Justice Warriors started to feel sorry for the poor kid.  So finally, one of us went and wrote the comic about what we’d all like to do:

The Rescue of Vivian James

Enjoy.

Super Fun Anita Sarkeesian Pop Quiz

For a long time now, Jack Thompson has been Satan for video gamers. He really does want to take their video games away, and he really does want to censor what’s left, and for a time he had a bit of a movement going for that purpose. When Gamergaters wanted to thoroughly demonize someone, they accused them of being like Jack Thompson.

And now, because he said a few condemnatory things about Anita Sarkeesian, he has earned the favor of Gamergaters.

Not that there was any doubt left at this point, but I would like to present Exhibit #8,756,982 that GamerGate exists for the purpose of harassing women out of video games, and that purpose alone, and they’re willing to work with the Satan of Video Games to do it.

we hunted the mammoth

GamerGate may have to retire this bit of propaganda.

Today, a quick quiz to see how closely you’ve been following controversies in the world of video gaming.  Well, a quiz that’s sort of been shoehorned into a poll. The correct answer(s) come after the bump. Enjoy!

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The Gamergate Shitbags Have Doxxed Felicia Day

Yesterday, I mentioned that the past few days had been pretty nasty on the Internet.  This is what I was talking about.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Felicia Day, she’s an actress who first appeared as a potential Slayer in the final season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  A few years later, she co-starred with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, after which she herself created The Guild, a YouTube sitcom about an online gaming group.  She’s one of the most beloved celebrities in nerd-dom, a goddamn gaming ambassador to mainstream culture.

And this week, the unspeakable bastards of Gamergate doxxed her.

She had just made her first and only statement on Gamergate, where she had stated that she hadn’t said anything about Gamergate because she was terrified of being doxxed, because she’d had dangerous and mentally-ill stalkers find their way to her home when her address was hard to find.  She didn’t need her information made public.

And what happened?  Fifty minutes later, on that very thread, her information was made public.  She’d said something that wasn’t positive about Gamergate, so her life and family would be put in danger.

If anyone needed further evidence that Gamergate is nothing but an anti-woman lynch mob, here you go.

Further information here and here.

In a series of brilliant, furious Tweets, Zoe Quinn tears apart the myth that #GamerGate has “moved beyond” harassment of women

Zoe Quinn once again provides the evidence – as if there was any doubt – that #Gamergate is about harassing women and trying to drive them out of video games.

Oh, and for the little shit who asked Zoe Quinn and her boyfriend to stay out of “our games”? They are not your games. They were never your games, and no matter how much shit you throw, you will never be the dominant demographic again. Your world is over.

we hunted the mammoth

Get over it, dudes.

Zoe Quinn has had it.

Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.

Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of…

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Yet another woman in gaming has been driven from her home by death threats

#Gamergate finds another woman to harass.

#Gamergate is about harassing women and trying to drive them out of video games. It was always about harassing women and trying to drive them out of video games. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

we hunted the mammoth

Post memes on Twitter making fun of #GamerGaters, get death threats.

The memes above? A fan of indie game developer Brianna Wu made them, using the text from some of Wu’s acerbic tweets about #GamerGaters. Wu thought the memes were funny, and posted them to Twitter.

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