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.
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!
Suckiest Bunch Of Sucks is the only thing that comes to mind after something like that
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...
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???
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 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
I think the reason I stopped believing in it is because i eventually noticed that everyone selling it gave off such pathetic/rancid vibes
People who knew me back then tell me I should have more empathy for the incels of today because my brain was full of holes that garbage like 4chan filled. I made fun of Anita Sarkeesian and cared deeply about "ethics in games journalism" because I was a drop out and a shut in with nothing better to focus my energy on.
If anything, I have more anger than I did back then, but its directed at the groups and institutions that perpetuate this shit and keep those 'movements' alive. I understand what it was like to have been a reactionary teenager, but I also know that I was intelligent enough to know better and none of my behavior deserves an excuse.
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.
Gotta say, I mostly view incels with pity. Like, if the demiurge isn't real, they've created it and made it their god. : (
I pity them in a general sense and know the way to fixing them is to give them positive focuses for their energy and meaningful social experiences. And the removal of their idols. All the same stuff that happened to me. But reading their comments, in the moment all I feel is disgust and a want to protect people from them.
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.
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
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 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".
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.
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
I forgive you.
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"
I think I was simply AFK for a couple days and then never bothered to find a good youtube video to get me up to speed for gamergate. So I saw some Anita Shavvershivvermetimbers bashing but I didn't have any context so I kept being preoccupied with something else. I still don't know what it was.
I play a primarily luck-based build in life.
For about five minutes I was interested in the fake "ethics in game journalism" thing before I saw all the death threats and hilarious racism. During that time I also watched some cring new atheist "debunk the creationists" slop, then they also got racist/sexist/transphobic lmao. They really can't hide it for long huh.
Anyway then I became a godless queer authoritankie
I remember how my irl trans girl friend brought the Zoe Quinn story to me and tried to be really serious about her (allegedly) sleeping with reviewers was a serious ethical problem. Her main exposure to news online was reddit and knowyourmeme, mostly, for some reason, the later. I immediatly wrote it off as a nothingburger because I 1. was active on tumblr at the time and had been getting my feminisism 101 education 2. have always been fairly sexually libertine, and didnt see an ethical problem with it at its core anyway. She was aghast that I didnt see a problem with it lol.
Eventually she did get off the Gamergate train but even then she said that it "got bad" and "BECAME" about harassment. I tried to tell her it was about that from the start but dropped it and decided her jumping off of it was enough. Havent talked to her in years so idk where her mindset is at and its not something you easily bring up anyway. Idk if she would have fallen for the Sweet Baby stuff or not.
I had a reactionary period of my life as a young teen and I value it. It gave me a window into their mindset that I use to understand it and better my criticism of it. I grew up a pretty devout catholic, for example, and that enables me to not have boilerplate reddit atheist criticism of it. I go for the soft spots. The real juicy morsels.
When gamergate dropped I was dating and living with a "not like other girls" woman but luckily neither of us got invested into it despite being a little "primed" so to speak. If I had been some doomer incel maybe I'd have gotten into it but the bullet was dodged. I still had some reactionary views and lots of room to grow and still do but that's life. It is a process and anyone who has 100% "correct opinions" is regurgitating something they were told without really thinking aboutit, a liar, or they've never been tested.
It's okay to look back and go "yeesh those were dark days" but don't be too hard on your younger self. You wouldn't be here without them and think about how much weirder it would be to have those growing pains now. Think about other dumb shit we do as kids like climbing a tree only to fall and break an arm. I'd rather use youthful bone growth at 14 than 45.
Don't feel too bad. I mean ffs I bought and took ivermectin early on in covid (got taken in by the supposedly promising results in latin america and the doctors promoting it on the michael brooks show). I was literally on 4chan as a kid but never got into GamerGate somehow. Not sure if it was before or after my time.
i wasn't old enough for gamergate but if it makes you feel better i was watching islamophobes back in 2017... as a muslim. it didn't last long though because somehow "the muslims are coordinating mass r*pe on teenage white girls in no-go zones in sweden" wasn't a compelling message.
games
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
-
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
- No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much