Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Conversation with the Rageaholic (Razorfist) (27⧸03⧸2015)

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March 27, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:27:35

A Conversation with the Rageaholic (Razorfist) (27⧸03⧸2015)

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	Blob.
	Hey, and are we actually live?
	Has this actually oh, it has actually started now.
	Sorry, hello, everyone.
	We kind of started without you there.
	I'm here with Razor Fist.
	We were already halfway through a conversation when this decided to find you.
	Yeah, we were halfway through a conversation.
	We were talking about the last episode of the game Overthinker.
	Yes, for the uninitiated, that's Movie Bob, formerly of The Escapist, has finished his epic 100 episode series, and it's worth a mention.
	So yeah, before we go on, then I was saying that we've got to give him some credit.
	He has worked for an eternity on these videos, and he's stuck with it.
	He's done the 100 episodes.
	He's managed to finish it, and he's been the one who's been doing all of the performances, quote unquote, in the videos.
	If you feel comfortable describing them and stuff.
	Which I don't.
	A lot of work clearly went into this.
	And I kind of feel that they were a labor of love for him.
	So I want to give him credit because he clearly put a lot of work into it.
	So I was looking at it thinking, it probably is a lot of work to pretend to fight with yourself during costumes and all this sort of stuff.
	Imagine, like, you know, you do all these attacks and stuff like that, and then you're trying to sync them up and they don't quite sync up.
	You're like, oh, shit, now I've got to redo the whole thing.
	And it's just him.
	So I can see how it was probably a lot of work.
	And he kept the quality consistent throughout the whole thing, just consistently mediocre.
	But it was consistently.
	Listen, he's the Ed Wood of YouTube video game reviewers.
	Let's be real here.
	My favorite little, as I said, I believe you guys were coming in right as I said it.
	My favorite quote from the latest episode of the final episode of The Overthinker, latest final whatever, is the quote when he says, I'm a pop culture critic.
	Relevance is my lifeblood, folks.
	And I'm like, Rel, you were just dropped from the escape.
	High fructose corn syrup is your lifeblood movie, Bob.
	Mad scared where you dress up in baby blue butt-flap jammies and vigorously agree with yourself for 30 fucking minutes.
	There's your fucking lifeblood movie, Bob.
	Did you notice how he was playing chess as well?
	Yeah, with himself.
	And the one guy who did the commentary, I forget what his, his name escapes me, but I watched his video on YouTube and I thought it was hilarious.
	And even Movie Bob himself reacted to it, and of course, with just a cheap insult to the guy.
	A really bad unfunny one, too.
	But no, no, I was watching it today, and he sits down to play chess with himself, and he sits there and he begins by moving like the king two spaces out.
	And it's just like, Bob, do you know how to play chess?
	And then it flips over to his opponent, which is also him.
	And he takes it as a castle and moves it as if it's a knight on crack to somewhere in the middle of the chessboard.
	I'm like, Bob, what are you doing?
	You don't understand how these Nouveau gauche types play chess.
	They have their own rules.
	This is clearly something I've never seen.
	Chess do not apply to them.
	My other favorite bit was when in this video he described Call of Duty as neocon war propaganda.
	I was telling you before the stream turned.
	I'm like, I guess I missed the fucking meeting where Neocons decided that every bad guy in the world is a rich old white dude.
	That kind of seems like the opposite of what they've been telling us for the past 20 years.
	Yeah, like name a college.
	I mean, I get that you're shooting brown people for most of most of the games, but like at the end, who's always the bad guy?
	It's an American general or an American businessman or it's, you know, it's a Russian general or it's always a white guy.
	And hasn't, I mean, I don't play these games, but I'm aware that there has been a distinctly sort of anti-war theme in the narrative in the last few.
	Is that true, or am I being misinformed there?
	Oh, yes, absolutely.
	I would say it goes all the way back to even Call of Duty 4 was a fairly anti-war film.
	They open up a film.
	It is kind of a film at the beginning of the game.
	That was the most Freudian of Freudian flips.
	But the game opens up with a nuclear detonation.
	I don't know how that's pro-war.
	I don't see anyone having a circle jerk saying, yay, nuclear detonations.
	My characters just died.
	Huzzah.
	This has been wonderful.
	But this all stems back from Bob's absolute hatred of the right.
	He's so.
	Oh, conspiracy theories.
	He would have to be in a booth.
	He would actually have to be in a booth in a pitch black room to be projecting any fucking more than he is right now.
	It's just pure projection.
	He will project the right onto everyone.
	If I disagree with him, I'm a bro.
	Even though, like, we honestly looking at the games that we both like, apart from his obvious predilection for Japanese schoolgirls, we have a fairly identical taste in gaming.
	Thief the Dark Project is not exactly a bro-tastic video game.
	Oh, it's a hell of a good game, Thief the Dark Project.
	It's just one of those eternal classics.
	But was it you who linked me to the video that I hadn't seen in forever?
	Actually, I think my buddy A. Solieri linked me to it a while back.
	I think we did a takedown on it where it was the building a better gamer video.
	Yeah, I've seen it.
	I've seen it.
	Bob Titman is advising people to play.
	I'll give him dietary advice.
	Yeah.
	You should exercise.
	Don't eat civilian.
	I can't even get it out.
	Just Bob, Bob, what is delivering a compassionate exhortation on the subject of gamers being more physically active?
	Yeah, Bob.
	Just what I'm looking for on YouTube.
	An impassioned cardiac critique from someone who looks like he knows the best wine to pair with a medium-sized sedan.
	I think you've isolated a market there, Bob.
	I just...
	I mean, he does, at one point in the video, he pays a very, very small attention to the fact...
	He says something like, and it's not even him saying it, but it's just a screenshot of him saying something like, yes, I know a fat guy talking about exercise.
	And it's just like, no, Bob, if it was the only in 20 minutes, in 20 ponderous minutes.
	Bob, if it was just like a normal fat guy, you know, just some guy who was a bit chubby saying about exercise, then yes, that would be appropriate.
	You don't seem to understand the scope of what you're doing.
	Yeah, and it's not like we're just poking.
	Look, if I were, I don't expect people would take much of my advice seriously if I were telling people how to bulk up for a sumo competition.
	It's not.
	It's just being realistic and considering the source.
	Like, if a fat guy's giving advice like that, I guess he's playing devil's food advocate.
	I don't know.
	Devil's cake advocate.
	Oh, man.
	Now I want devil's food cake.
	God damn it.
	Me too, me too.
	I mean, come on.
	Every time I see this guy, and he was tweeting online about, well, where else is he going to tweet at?
	Obviously, yeah.
	Every time I see him tweet that he's flying out to a con, it makes me doubt the very physics of air travel, and he's going to give me a fucking critique on goddamn physical fitness.
	He always strikes me as the sort of person who probably complains that he gets charged for two seats or something like that.
	Or the guy that you're seated next to, and there's like an empty seat between you, and you go to the bathroom and come back, and he's taken up the second one.
	Like, I hate that.
	I hate when people do that.
	Those are aggressive cunts.
	What was I going to say?
	There was something else about Bob that I was going to say, oh, shit, I can't remember what it was now.
	There's just so much about Bob's.
	My favorite phrase in that was he mentioned inertia or something.
	And it was like, way to just leave the door open, Bob.
	Wait, like, listen to treatises on why.
	That's what he said.
	He said, idleness is part of the fundamental inertia of gaming.
	Like, why are you, how are you an expert?
	Just because you have enough mass to support your own self-perpetuating field of it.
	Well, one thing I always find funny is that he gives mention to like, oh, feminist conspiracies and games and stuff like that.
	And then he goes on about right-wing conspiracies, about how right-wing people are trying to manipulate gamers for their own agenda.
	And he's talking about Breitbart breaking the Game Journal Pros list and all that sort of thing.
	Yeah, he contradicts himself as well.
	I believe in that video he says something to the effect of right-wingers had been trying to get into gaming for years, ever since they realized that video games hadn't yet grown up like films had.
	And it's like, so wait a minute, you're kind of arguing that right-wingers are already in games, but then you're saying they're trying to infiltrate it at the same time.
	Like, which is it?
	You're kind of having your devil's dick and eating it too.
	Well, that's the thing.
	And then, and then when talking about gaming, he's like, you know, all these right-wingers are puppeteering you or something to those effects.
	Like, no, Bob, look, man, I know that you might want to think that's the case, but you have to understand, people are pissed off at you guys because you're dicks.
	You're fucking dicks and you're lied to yourselves.
	You know, everyone knows what fucking Breitbart are about.
	You know, everyone knows what Adam Baldwin wants.
	All that sort of stuff.
	Honestly, they're really not that fucking, you know, what they want is really not too similar to what I want.
	But they in the actual journalistic legwork, you know?
	And did you catch his oh-so-cogent summary of Gamergate in its entirety?
	I did.
	Go on.
	Sorry, do you want to remind everyone?
	Just.
	Oh, basically, he was one of the people who just boils it down to, oh, Zoe Quinn, the whole Zoe Quinn started it because there was an angry boyfriend who got back at his girlfriend and whatever.
	And then they turned it into an excuse to believe that there was some sort of conspiracy.
	They construed it as a conspiracy.
	On what planet is the subject of an article being fucked by the guy who's writing the article, not grounds for a conspiracy.
	That's like, what?
	It doesn't even need to be a conspiracy.
	This is naked fucking corruption, Bob.
	And the thing is, in his description of it, he specifically, specifically ignores the fact that Grayson was a journalist.
	Completely.
	He automatically goes, well, these people, you know, I think he actually says the word misogyny.
	And I'm just like, fuck's sake, Bob.
	You know, for fuck's sake, you are deliberately willfully ignoring it.
	Let's be real.
	With how feminism is gone now, I mean, it's it's misogynist is the new duty head.
	It's like it doesn't, it's lost its meaning.
	I think they've overused it.
	I've actually been like, um, you know, I spend a lot of time reading a lot of feminist stuff, and I think misogynist has literally become their word for anti-feminist.
	It is absolutely pirouetted off the deep end.
	Yeah, I've heard them describe so many women as misogynists.
	And I mean, really, really, you're actually going to call it.
	I've seen it.
	Like, what was it?
	I don't know if it was Anita or somebody else who was arguing that shaving, and this is a very popular argument, by the way, in third wave feminist circles, that shaving your slash is somehow perpetuating misogyny.
	A decision a woman makes for herself in the privacy of her bathroom.
	Like, I literally cannot envision a location where a man conceivably has less authority than a woman's restroom.
	And the argument that they use, oh, you want me to shave because you're secretly attracted to little girls that betrays the latent pedophilic underpinnings of the male psyche.
	Right.
	And women wear makeup because men secretly want to fuck clowns.
	Shave the particles off your slash.
	Shut up.
	It's just about maintenance, for Christ's sake.
	It's a woman's choice.
	Let her make her own goddamn choice.
	Wow, Jesus.
	Since we're on the subject.
	Did you see Anita Sarkeesian at the How to Be a Feminist thing in the Sydney Opera House?
	No.
	Really?
	Oh, shit, man.
	It is.
	Well, you only have to take five seconds and look at one of her videos.
	I mean, Sarkeesian, invariably, in all these videos, she's dolled up like the only clean whore in Saigon.
	Absolutely.
	It's incredible how she'll sit there and talk about gender signifiers with her hoopy earrings, long hair, and plushed up lipstick.
	It's incredible.
	No sense of irony whatsoever.
	But the thing is, this roundtable was, it was amazing.
	It was, she was literally coming out and saying all of those things that you would, you knew that she thought, but she was literally saying like, women, women, oh, what exactly does she say?
	I'm going to paraphrase, but she's complaining that women have agency and they make choices.
	And she's complaining that the choices that women make hurt other women.
	And what she means is the choices women make hurt feminism.
	It doesn't promote feminism.
	And she doesn't like that.
	And so she is arguing against women being able to make their own choices.
	It's unfucking believable.
	I was just staggered.
	I'm going to be doing a big video on it at some point just because there is so much in there.
	Well, that's at the core of it.
	It's always the core philosophy is, we know better than you do, is just the long and short of it.
	You know, you don't need any of those pesky decisions or free will.
	We'll handle that.
	We'll take the wheel.
	It's fine.
	She's literally saying that women are incapable of making their own decisions.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And that's the implication is that women are absolutely too incompetent to make their own decisions.
	Absolutely.
	And the thing is, she starts by saying, I used to be one of those people who said, I believe in equality, but I'm not a feminist.
	It's just like, okay, well, what happened?
	And then she's like, I had to learn how to be a feminist.
	And then all of a sudden, I was seeing misogyny and sexism everywhere.
	And I became like the most unpleasant person to be around.
	I'm like, okay.
	Yeah, it's like a completely bullshit version of they live.
	That's what it's like.
	It absolutely is.
	It's exactly that.
	And you must think, you know, okay, stop you there, Anita, right?
	Because if suddenly the whole world is just literally overnight flips from being completely, it's a bunch of people, independent actors, making independent decisions to misogyny everywhere.
	Do you think you might be wrong?
	I just want you to reconsider your perspective, for fuck's sake.
	It's absurd.
	It's absolutely absurd.
	Oh, I know.
	Absurd.
	Absurd when we're discussing Sarkeesian.
	Are you sure?
	Are you sure?
	If you can believe it.
	If you can believe it.
	I'll suspend my disbelief for a moment.
	On that note, I've just checked Twitter and people are like, oh yeah, by the way, it's on the subject of Anita Sarkeesian.
	It's Happy National Cleavage Day, which Sarkeesian must just be raging in San Francisco.
	He hates the male gates.
	That's another thing.
	All the way through this thing, she's such a Puritan.
	She is such a Puritan.
	He's the most sex-negative, sex-negative feminists that he could possibly have.
	A lot of these third-wave feminists are pushing the...
	We were going to talk about this, too.
	The ban of booth babes from E3 and other events and so forth.
	Let's go.
	I've always felt they were kind of an irrelevancy.
	I think that's the worst thing you can say about booth babes.
	Yeah.
	That's just the irony of it all is that their Puritanism is so all-encompassing.
	They wind up disadvantaging women in some way.
	I mean, because there's women that get employed.
	They're employed and taking center stage to, in fact, draw young men over.
	You know, they're so appealing.
	Young men will gravitate to them.
	But they're so disadvantaged.
	So disadvantaged.
	That's why, okay, I'm not entirely anti a booth babe ban, but I want to make it perfectly clear that the reason that I would support one is just because it's a distraction.
	I would rather these events were more about gaming.
	Now, that said, I understand they're never going to be about gaming again because it's all about fluff.
	I mean, we all are hip to that fact.
	So as long as it's all about fluff, what's wrong with looking at some titties?
	Did you see the there was an article on Reaxion.com.
	It's not normally the sort of place I go to, but talking about gaming not being about games anymore, I'm going to share my screen, because it was just one of those things you've got to fucking see.
	All right.
	It's just...
	I've got two things to show, actually.
	Right, so everyone should probably be able to see the top 10 cringeworthy pictures that signal the decline of the GDC.
	Now, this is for people who don't know.
	By the way, they should all be photographs of Tim Schaefer's speech.
	Just throwing that out there.
	I love how many people he pissed off with that.
	People who aren't pile Gaming Gate, they don't care about Game.
	Probably didn't even like Gamergate.
	But Tim, when a fucking fat, rich old white man gets up on a stage at what should have been a politically neutral conference to mock women and minorities with a fucking sock puppet like a child, Tim, you fucking idiot.
	You look like the manifestation of the patriarchy.
	Yeah, it's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	Every time you think maybe the momentum is going out of Gamergate a little bit, some idiot does something so stupid that you can no longer ignore its meat to exist.
	They cannot help themselves, can they?
	They just can't fucking.
	They have to poke the tiger.
	They do.
	But yeah, so this was great.
	I mean, Zoe Quinn, obviously, but fat chicks.
	I'm not so worried about the fat chicks being there.
	That's fine.
	But stuff like this.
	This was a poster on the wall.
	Feminism isn't a destination.
	You don't get to identify and quit.
	Eliminating conscious bias is step one out of infinite.
	We are all issed.
	Conquering unconscious bias requires active work.
	Express your anti-bias.
	What are we at a game developers conference here?
	Yeah, what is this?
	What is this?
	Actually, I had an ex who took a feminist course at a college.
	It was actually less biased than that, than what I just read just now.
	Exactly.
	And then you've got the diversity card.
	Diversity attracts diversity.
	It's like, okay, Han.
	You have looked at this incredibly white pastiche of people, haven't you?
	You know, it's, yeah, just talk, you know, nothing but like diversity this, diversity that.
	Yeah.
	Double think bullshit.
	Double think.
	I love this.
	Exposing students to diverse perspectives expands their potential as makers, creators, programmers, critics, and artists.
	It's like, what?
	Oh, and then Tim fucking Schaefer.
	Well, we did eventually get around to that.
	Gender-neutral bathrooms.
	Why?
	What in the fuck?
	What in the fuck?
	Safe spaces, obviously.
	Fucking, of course, safe spaces.
	And then, Equation Gaming Gate, Content Warning, Rape, Murder, Racism, Misogyny, Transphobia, Violence, Gaming Gate.
	Wasn't that part of Tim Schafer's speech?
	It might have been, but I'm just looking at it like one of those things just isn't like the rest, you know?
	Yeah.
	Oh, no, no, no, no.
	He did that.
	He did that deliberately.
	Oh, provocateur.
	So fucking ridiculous.
	Oh, and then something from Neogaff.
	But yeah, so that in itself was pretty fucking ridiculous, I thought.
	And someone has just tweeted this at me, which I'm just going to fanny around getting this to work now.
	You know who Lionhead Studios are, right?
	Yes, I do.
	Yeah, they've just tweeted this for National Cleaner Day.
	Can you see that?
	And you can imagine that the first comment is, did you just seriously do this, Lionhead Studios?
	Yeah, 30.
	Come on, this is a game.
	Like, did any of you play any of the Fable games?
	Oh, no, no, no.
	They're like, are you serious?
	My mind is full of fuck.
	What the shit is this?
	Sigh.
	Oh, my God.
	And then someone was like, oh, this has got Gamergate written all over it.
	I don't know where that's gone, actually, but someone said this, and it's just like, oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
	Did they realize that Lionhead Studios were doing this before Gamergate was even a thought?
	Did they realize that this kind of stuff is in the first Fable game?
	Second player.
	Games?
	They don't play games.
	They had no idea.
	They don't fucking play games.
	And it's just like, you know, I mean, I'm going to retweet that shit actually because it's fucking awesome.
	Well done, Lionhead.
	You know, fucking impressed.
	Oh, I'm allowed to retweet.
	Fuck.
	And what do you want to bet it was a female who tweeted that?
	Because there are actually a lot of females that work at Lionhead Studios.
	I hope so.
	It's probably how they're going to cover it, isn't it?
	You know, be like, well, you know, a woman did it.
	So what are you talking about?
	I bet.
	I know that at least one of their major senior artists on Fable 2 was a woman who basically was responsible for a good chunk of the art design.
	That just goes to show.
	It's all about agency, and it's all about being an issue and just like that fucking PowerPoint presentation said.
	It absolutely is.
	And you don't get to identify and quit because what they really mean there is you don't get to just go, yeah, yeah, I'm a feminist.
	Now, can we talk about something else?
	Which is ideally what everyone else would like to do.
	Yeah.
	I mean, look, I've complained.
	It's so weird because, like, when you really, like, if these people were able to think more than two steps into a problem, if you really want to get down to the concept of objectifying people, okay, let's say there's sexualized booth babes.
	Is it not equally demeaning to men?
	Like, if they're literally hiring swaths of women, like dozens, if Activision is literally shipping these failed underwear models into E3 so that they can catch the eye of guys, is that not basically like saying, oh, you're all mouth breathers, and if we put hot chicks here, you'll buy our stuff.
	That's kind of a little bit demeaning to men as well.
	Like, if we were all as cagey about being demeaned as these fucking bitches are, we would actually have an argument, I believe.
	And that could certainly be fleshed out more.
	Yeah, I mean, it's completely taking advantage of men's, like, you know, most base urges, isn't it?
	Oh, there's an attractive one over there.
	I'm going to walk in that direction.
	The only difference is we don't care.
	We don't.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We're not getting our fucking panties and a bunch over it.
	What was the thing you wanted to talk about other than Movie Bob?
	I'm sorry, what?
	What was the thing you wanted to talk about other than Movie Bob?
	Oh, no, no, no.
	That was what I did actually want to talk a little bit about that.
	I mean, the booth babe bam from E3 is kind of.
	I just think that's like that right there is a sign of the times.
	That is a moment where we can kind of take the pulse of where the gaming industry is right now and see, like, bam, like, that's where we've come to in such a short period of time.
	I mean, I remember when E3 a few years back tried to be more of like an industry trade show.
	You remember that for like, I don't know, three years?
	They pared down the hype and they didn't have as many like big flashy announcements and they didn't let booth babes in for a little while.
	Do you remember what I'm talking about at all?
	I actually don't know very well.
	See, I'm not very into these.
	Because for a few years, E3 became a little bit of a punchline because it was like just a constant fucking.
	Yeah, it became like just this big fucking hype foundry.
	It was essentially the San Diego Comic-Con of gaming, which is kind of what it's defaulted back into being.
	And then a few developers and publishers started to complain, and they were just like, we're not really talking about games anymore.
	So why don't we talk about games again and turn it into a little bit more private, make people have to have a press pass in order to get in and so forth.
	It couldn't be quite such an event.
	And it wasn't the best move they ever made because the next year, a bunch of people pulled out because nobody was showing up and it wasn't cultivating the same amount of hype as it had before.
	I mean, I could see that in this case, but E3 is not doing that.
	And PAX isn't doing that.
	They're not paring down to become more of a fucking industry trade show that just concentrates on digital entertainment and actually video game announcements.
	They're still just about fluff and hype.
	So this is sort of a pointless fucking gesture.
	If you are going to support a booth babe bam, at least have a good reason for it.
	Like, am I the only fuck in the room who realizes that banning the booth bitches from E3 is just removing one more rung from the ladder of their inevitable descent into porn?
	I just say, I wasn't thinking of the booth babes.
	How selfish.
	I was thinking myself.
	See, this is the thing.
	I'm not like one of the industry show kind of guys because honestly, I just think, like you said, they're all fluff.
	It's just all, you know, it's all bullshit.
	But I guess they are reflective of the state of the industry.
	And again, like, with you, with the booth babes, I'm actually, you know, I'm 35.
	You know, if I was 16, 17, then yeah, there'd probably be an issue.
	They'd probably be something I'd be attracted to or whatever.
	But, you know, I'm just not that bothered about that sort of stuff now.
	You know, I'm more concerned about where I'm spending my money.
	I don't get that much time to play games these days, so I'm more concerned about how I can efficiently parcel out my time to play specific games.
	So, you know, a pair of games.
	You're not missing much on the game front.
	Oh, you're on that.
	Not always.
	But yeah, there's a lot of five star masterpieces coming out these days.
	Oh, I know.
	I bought Dying Light the other day, and I haven't actually.
	I've installed it, but I haven't actually even booted it up yet.
	I'm in the midst of playing the new Guilty Year, which I'm enjoying, and I'm about to publish a review of Final Fantasy Type Zero, talk about night and day.
	See, I've never been a Final Fantasy fan.
	Fucking pin a medal on your chest, sir.
	I know.
	I'm like the only person on earth who honestly, all of my friends, just a single one.
	Oh, Final Fantasy VII is the best game ever.
	All right, I've heard it so many times.
	I'm sure it's a great game.
	I'm just not that interested in it.
	Total Wargames, thank you.
	Yeah, I did.
	Well, I did a rather ballyhooed video.
	It was actually my second episode.
	That was basically a vicious takedown of Final Fantasy VII.
	Not the biggest fan in the world.
	Although I don't hate it as much as people probably assume.
	I just hate the long-term effect that that game had on JRPGs going forward and implicitly on the industry in general.
	The whole cutscene thing and the linear narrative thing, all that stuff that we're still sort of wallowing in, and the big movie-style trailers to advertise the game.
	All that bullshit starts with Final Fantasy VII.
	Yeah, I mean, in itself, it's probably a good game.
	You know, everyone wouldn't be talking about it so much if it wasn't a good game, but it's one of those things when it kind of warps the culture around it because of the legendary reputation it ends up with.
	I think the most recent example of that is probably the most recent, prominent example that I can think of is probably Resident Evil 4, which is a great game.
	I enjoy it, but it set the pattern for what 5 and 6 were, and all the problems that those games had kind of started on 4.
	4 works.
	It's not like my favorite game ever, but it's, you know, it started third-person shooting, action-oriented, rampant cutscenes.
	Although cutscenes were always in there, and of course, the QuickTime events, omnipresent QuickTime events, fucking Simon Says mini-games.
	See, I'm still, I mean, I'm not a console pleb, so I don't have to deal with QuickTime events.
	I've never played a game with QuickTime events, in fact.
	And so I. Again, I'm going to pin another medal on your chest.
	Jesus Christ, how are you avoiding these trumps?
	Because I'm part of the future.
	What is the secret of your power?
	Are you from a dying planet?
	Did you crash here in a space capsule?
	Pretty much, actually.
	The thing is, I'm a PC gamer.
	I've never had, well, I've had consoles, but this was before the year of QuickTime events.
	And so I'm like, look, I've seen them in videos and stuff, and I'm just baffled as to who thought this would be a good idea.
	Just like, just show me the fucking cutscene with me fighting off the monster or something, or whatever.
	There's one action that you can take in the like 30 seconds of the quick time event, and it's just like, so what?
	What do you think I'm going to fuck it up?
	You know, I mean, what else am I supposed to do in that time?
	You know, pressure.
	My favorite is the two cutscenes with a tutorial sandwiched in between them.
	That's my favorite.
	Because apparently we don't have two brain cells to carry a static charge.
	Thanks for that one.
	Go ahead and buy me a lifetime prescription of adult vipers while you're at it.
	You know what?
	I'll just have an early night and stop playing.
	You know what I mean?
	Why am I doing any of this?
	Yeah, it's the handholding.
	I don't like the handholding.
	And that's what they really do.
	It drives me fucking nuts.
	I don't know.
	I was always more of a PC gamer as well.
	I still generally consider myself more of a PC gamer.
	But in order to keep up with modern titles, a lot of them don't come out on PC.
	That's true.
	I'm still waiting for a console.
	I'm going to say I really am.
	It's a slap of the face, Rockstar.
	What the fuck you did?
	Yep, yep, yep.
	Well, and they did that.
	They pulled that same shit with Red Dead Redemption and finally released that, didn't they?
	You know, I haven't actually played that yet.
	You should.
	It's very, very good.
	And it's what I've heard.
	Yeah, I absolutely love the shit out of it.
	It was fantastic.
	And there's not many good Western games, but that's great, irrespective of being a Western game.
	It's just really fucking good as a game as an open world.
	Some slight, light RPG elements to it.
	Pretty good gunplay.
	Graphics hold up remarkably well, considering this game came out in 2010.
	It's the gunplay that interests me in it, actually.
	I've seen videos in it.
	It looks good.
	Again, just time-ready.
	It's a little insulting.
	The gunplay is a little insultingly easy, I'm not going to lie.
	You kind of definitely get into a mode where the game basically auto-aims for you, essentially, and you just blow people's heads off without even fucking trying.
	There's this thing where basically every time you draw your gun, the game auto-aims onto someone.
	So if you wanted to, you could pretty much just take everyone down like fucking Eastwood and good magic.
	But that's cool.
	Yeah, that's true.
	If that's like what the game's built around, then fine, you know, that's great.
	Yeah, so there were some other things that I did want to talk about before we start just getting into talking shit.
	All right, let me just get them.
	Yeah, so okay.
	So you didn't know about this Rust game, did you?
	No, I didn't, but you were talking about the coverage.
	Yeah, so I'm sharing the screen, so everyone at home should be able to see it as well.
	Now, someone emailed this to me and it was on Gama Sutra, so wonderful.
	Rust experiments with racial empathy by assigning players skin tones.
	I'm thinking, okay, this can only end well.
	This can only end well.
	Now, to sum it up, it's basically the game Rust.
	When you start the game, it assigns, based on your Steam key, it assigns you a race of some sort in the game.
	So it tells you what your skin colour is, what your eye colour is, and it's designed to mimic a gene pool where you have to adjust to the hand you're dealt appearance-wise according to this article.
	Which is not uninteresting, but it becomes.
	Oh, it sounds like an interesting mechanic.
	I just have a feeling they're reading more into it than was intended.
	It's more like, I don't understand what really happens in video games, you know.
	It's like the guy who, the guy who did this is a guy called Gary Newman.
	He's like, I would love nothing more than if playing a black guy in a game made a white guy appreciate what it was like to be a persecuting minority.
	And I'm sat there thinking, I'm the fuck on.
	You were going to tell me you're going to be in a third-person action game, and it's going to be like, I'm sorry, Katenge, let's...
	Let's stop for 45 minutes and have a discussion about your feelings and what you've been through.
	Well, what the fuck?
	I'm just thinking, well, that's weird because I was playing Oblivion a while back and I loved being an Argonian because you could breathe underwater.
	And the guy's like, people have this strange need to play someone similar to themselves.
	And it's like, no, they don't.
	No, they fucking don't.
	Because I sure was playing a giant fucking cat guy in Skyrim.
	I'm pretty sure.
	I was playing an Argonian because I could breathe underwater.
	I wasn't doing it because I've got scaly fucking skin.
	And that's not even talking about the mods.
	Let's not even get into what happens when Fur Affinity gets a hold of Skyrim.
	Let's not even talk about that.
	Exactly.
	And, you know, like, yeah, I was playing Skyrim and I'm playing some giant Nord guy.
	And I'm not a giant Nord guy.
	You know what I mean?
	But it's this weird obsession with race.
	But you see, Sargon, you're enacting an Aryan fantasy because you're clearly a white supremacist at heart.
	That's what's going on.
	The Nords are just Norwegian Ubermensch.
	I was looking at the stats and thinking, well, they're pretty good stats.
	You know, they're better than the Red Guards.
	So the Red Guards are good at magic, aren't they?
	No, no.
	Now we're not going to get into the magic voodoo black people thing now, are we?
	Because this isn't going to be going a very bad direction.
	I wasn't going to, but the last character I played, I tried the magic, but you can't ever just be a straight mage in a fucking Elder Scrolls game.
	It really pisses me off.
	I really, really wish you could, but you can't.
	You have to have combat knowledge.
	So generally, I only use restoration magic and just keep myself up.
	Yeah, all the games since Oblivion have definitely nerfed magic.
	Magic was really cool in Morrowind.
	It was retarded awesome in Daggerfall because you could customize your own spells and all that fun stuff, which you could do to an extent in Oblivion and Morrowind, but not with the same level of depth.
	There are more schools of magic, if I remember correctly, in Daggerfall.
	And I'm not a big magic guy, so I didn't really explore it.
	But from what I understand, Dagger Fall's magic system was stupid deep.
	See, I actually came to the Elder Scrolls games in Oblivion, and then I went back to Morrowind.
	But I didn't get on with Morrowind because you can't fucking block.
	And after playing Oblivion, I was so used to having the block function that I couldn't really do.
	It's funny.
	I don't even think I've ever noticed that I didn't have the block.
	That's the thing about Morrowind, though.
	You crank up your agility so much that you just dodge.
	That's what replaces mock in Morrowind.
	You just dodge everything.
	And you'll notice that we're not talking about the fucking identity politics of the game.
	We're talking about what you can do with the mechanics of the game.
	All this article is identical.
	All of this, this whole thing just is this exemplifies everything that's wrong with the gaming industry.
	Or at least the media, right?
	So this guy's talking about nothing about what, you know, oh, I want a white guy to know what it's like to be a persecuted minority.
	And I'm just sat and thinking, okay, I'll stop you there.
	If this is some sort of MMO, I don't even know what kind of game this is.
	Don't even know.
	Don't even tell me.
	That seemed to be the takeaway from this, is that these people are writing a series of articles that are all about racial oppression, and they haven't really discussed what the game is for even a second.
	Well, I have no idea.
	The thing is, if it's like a third-person or a first-person shooter, and it's an MMO or a multiplayer game of some sort, I'm not really bothered about the race of the person who's shooting at me, but I'm concerned that they're shooting at me.
	And when I'm running around and I see someone, I'm just going to start shooting at them.
	It's not a racial judgment.
	No, it's a bit like if I'm walking down the street in, say, Los Angeles and someone opens fire on me.
	I'm sorry, at that point, you cease to be white American, Mexican-American.
	You become asshole that needs to die, American.
	That's war.
	That's all it means.
	And it's the same thing in video games.
	And the only information that we get, apart from the identity politics, is this link here, which is the latest update to FacePunch Studios Early Access Somali game.
	It's like, what were you talking about?
	Oh, it's a dev blog.
	And it's like, right, so what you're saying is I'm supposed to take away the empirical information about the game from their development blog.
	That's it.
	Yeah.
	About like, is it a good game?
	What are the controls?
	Like, all this sort of stuff.
	You know, all you get is their dev blog.
	It's like, okay, that's actually not very helpful because they're going to tell you that.
	And that really is.
	Yeah.
	That really is the priorities of modern gaming journalism in a nutshell.
	Is okay, here's a bunch of social bullshit we're going to cram down your throat.
	And oh, hey, if you would actually know about this fucking game, go get it straight from the horse's mouth and let them shove their propaganda down your throat.
	Exactly.
	It's not like it's our job to objectively assess the merits of this game or tell you anything about the playable demo we got.
	Consumer advocates or something like that.
	It's not our job to read these press releases for you and interpret.
	It's just such phenomenal bullshit.
	I assume that it's some sort of open world fucking or you get a stone pickaxe.
	So I imagine you harvest stuff like in every other game that exists nowadays.
	And things this game, it might well be quite good, you know, but I just you know, they don't seem to understand there just aren't enough interactions to make racism in a game viable.
	You know, you know, I would argue even in the average RPG, I mean, let's talk about what are like the most interactive in terms of like conversationally, what are the most interactive examples?
	There may be maybe like Alpha Protocol or Mass Effect or Dragon Age or something like that.
	Yeah, you've got a dialogue wheel or whatever.
	Even within that context, can you conceivably, I mean, Jesus Christ, play Mass Effect 3 sometime.
	They try to tackle the issue of homosexuality.
	Are you ready to hear about their ingenious tactic for tackling homosexuality?
	Are you ready for this?
	Okay.
	The engineer on your ship is gay.
	You find out within three lines of dialogue.
	He's like, oh, yeah, your ship's purring like a kitten.
	Yeah, your engine's great.
	By the way, I suck dick.
	Why?
	The most awkward hand-fisted dialogue in history.
	That's a really good example of why it kind of doesn't belong in games, because it can't be handled respectively.
	Because the game mechanics, I would argue, possibly may actually preclude it.
	I think there's actually an argument to be made that just the simplicity with which a game can't be too unwieldy in terms of its mechanics.
	It can't be.
	Or else it won't be fun.
	So having a 45-minute sit-down roundtable discussion where you recommend each other your favorite feminist authors is not a viable solution.
	Does presume excessively about the person playing it, doesn't it?
	It does.
	It literally, I mean, you couldn't have it in a Muslim game, a game you were selling in a Muslim country, you know, the overwhelming, or in Russia, you know.
	They tried to do that, and that's that's the awful thing.
	They almost did that with the first Assassin's Creed, because pretty much every character you run into in that game is theoretically Muslim.
	But then they like Disney-fied the fuck out of it before final release.
	From what I understand, there was originally going to be a lot more religious overtones.
	They also weren't going to have that goofy fucking animus machine that you're traveling through your ancestors' memories.
	It was just going to be a story set in the Middle East during the Crusades, which sounds a lot more interesting than what we got, quite frankly.
	Yeah, I've actually never played an Assassin's Creed game.
	I've heard a lot of good things.
	It's just there are so many.
	First two.
	Play the first two, ignore the rest, buddy.
	Well, I've not heard good things about the later ones, like everyone says.
	But yeah, getting back to this, though, like it, you know, it's a weird thing that they're just talking about identity politics.
	And then you get to the last line where Newman's comments on the matter are worth reading in full on the Kotaku article on a competing website.
	Yeah, a lot of that happens.
	No, a lot of that happens in the game.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	That's the problem.
	Yeah, is gaming journalism not succumbing to the associated press effect where one website writes or links a story and then everybody else just cites it?
	Like, I've often suspect one of the things that was remarkable about Gamergate when they, you know, the whole gamers are dead thing happened is that very few of those articles actually linked to an original article.
	That's what made everyone smell a rat, is that it seemed like it just kind of conjured up out of nowhere.
	No one was citing anyone else.
	Well, there were a few of them.
	I think there were a couple.
	But for the most part, it was like everybody just woke up one day and kind of decided, oh, gamers are over.
	Yeah, and that's the thing.
	We get to an article by Nathan Grayson.
	Fucking, of course.
	Nathan, oh, it's a video game, Grayson.
	Fucking finally gets to talk about something he likes, black guys.
	So it's just, you know, so yeah, it's literally, it's just like, here, why don't you just, if you want to read more, just go to our opponent's website.
	You know, go to go there.
	But the thing is, it shows like the sort of cascade effect that we're having the issue with.
	Where, you know what, the Gamers are Dead articles might not have even been the result of collusion.
	They really might not have done.
	They might well have been the result of ideological conformity and laziness, which I think is what we're seeing here.
	What we're seeing is Nathan Grayson goes and speaks to some studio about a game called Rust.
	It's some open world game where you can do stuff.
	He doesn't care about that.
	What he cares about are the social things where you can only be a black guy or whatever.
	You don't get to choose.
	Okay.
	He finds that interesting.
	And then someone else at Garma Sutra is like, oh, I find that interesting.
	And I feel the need to announce to the world that I found that interesting.
	So I'm going to write an article that is nothing in here that isn't in here.
	But I'm going to write this article anyway, just so it's on Garma Sutra.
	So it's like a show.
	It's like a performance.
	It's showing other people, hey, we're on the same team and we're going to Grayson's Article.
	You know what it is?
	It's ideological show and tell is what it is.
	It's totally just.
	It's like wearing the colours, you know?
	It's almost like filming yourself, talking to yourself, agreeing with yourself in a final game over-eater episode.
	It's kind of like that.
	A little bit.
	Oh, Bob, you're never going to leave.
	My favorite bit of that is where he's sat there going, Hey, what, you know, you can have little handheld devices that had all the Metroid games on, and then the other one's like, Yeah, that's a good idea.
	It's like, that's gaming, you gibbering retard.
	What do you think?
	Just, oh, but yeah, that's called a smartphone, you drooling moron.
	Jesus Christ.
	That would have been a good idea about 15 years ago.
	You know, it would have been a good idea then.
	You know, but now, sorry, if everyone's phone wasn't jailbroken, yeah, like it would be brilliant.
	Exactly happening.
	Exactly.
	But so, yeah, going through this whole article, again, it's just talking about the fucking race of the person that you have to be.
	And it's just like, okay, I don't care.
	I'm not looking at my own fucking character when I'm running around shooting people or harvesting fucking wood or whatever, building a cabin.
	I just don't care what my character looks like.
	He could be an oblong fucking beige block or something.
	I don't give a damn.
	You know, I care about how fast he runs and how high he jumps and how quickly he reloads his guns, you know?
	Just yeah.
	But that's the thing.
	This whole thing is just there are so many points with this that just show everything wrong with modern gaming media.
	You know, they don't even need to collude.
	They're all so on the same page.
	And that was, didn't I talk about this on the last stream a little bit where I was shocked?
	I actually found myself agreeing with a thing that Bill O'Reilly had said because he was talking.
	I believe they had accused him of being biased, which no shit, an editorial program is biased.
	Like, I'm shocked.
	It's an editorial program.
	He has to promulgate a bias.
	That's the idea.
	He's not reporting.
	He never claims he is.
	But, anyways, so like they accused him of bias, and he was like, okay, yeah, like, I'm biased.
	He's like, and then there was some sort of story that came out about a memo circulating around the O'Reilly Factor offices saying, let's slant this story in this direction or something.
	And everyone pointed to it as this smoking gun of Fox News being biased, which means shit.
	Fuck.
	Yeah, did you realize the canoe had been invented too?
	Like, come on.
	Anyways, so they pointed every all the leftist media outlets kind of pointed to this.
	Sorry, I just hit my microphone.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Pointed to this as this example of collusion at Fox News.
	And he was like, you know what?
	The real problem is that you need to be asking is why don't NBC, ABC, and CBS have to have memos like this around their editorial rooms?
	It's because they're all on the same page ideologically.
	They implicitly slant their news.
	And I was like, fucking out of the mouth of intellectual babes.
	There's some serious fucking truth there.
	He's not wrong.
	It's like, I think arguably an even more pernicious problem in gaming journalism is when they don't have to collude.
	There doesn't have to be a conspiracy simply because they all come from the same ideological echo chambers.
	They all support essentially the exact same causes.
	And they're all trying to push it forward in essentially the exact same way.
	I can't imagine running a website for video game news and stuff like that, reviews, editorial, that sort of thing, where I just go to, I just find Nathan Grayson's article right up of it.
	Read, you know, read it and go, oh, yeah, I totally agree with that.
	I'm going to pull out the little bits I like, just parrot them back in less time on my own website, and then just be like, you know what?
	Just go to his website if you want to read more about it.
	You know, you want the click.
	You don't want them to just go, you know, I will just go straight to that.
	Thank you.
	You know, I just don't understand how they think their business model works.
	Yeah.
	So I do not understand.
	Well, you know, maybe it's a little bit of a closing of the ranks.
	Hey, go to this website because we all don't want to foul up each other's hustle, so try and keep the traffic flowing on these sub-par journalistic circle jerks.
	Yeah, maybe.
	I mean, I actually watched a documentary.
	No, no, not a documentary, but like I think it was NBC or ABC news piece about Nick Denton and Gorka.
	And it was very interesting.
	And one thing that I took away from it was that they're shameless.
	They are absolutely shameless.
	They are not afraid to be the lowest common denominator.
	In fact, in almost any profession, in almost any walk of life, in anything that anyone does, there is a right way to do things and there is a wrong way to do things.
	They are proud to do things the wrong way.
	They're absolutely proud.
	And in the middle, all of the Gorka sites are all in the same building.
	They'll sit near each other.
	And it breeds the same sort of culture.
	For example, in this room, Stephen Totillo was rubbing shoulders with the Jezebel writers.
	Yeah, I bet.
	No, no, exactly.
	He absolutely was.
	And so it's like, right, okay, that explains a lot.
	But on the way.
	Did I ever mention to you, by the way, that Stephen Totillo personally re-reacted to my.
	And this was long before Gamergate was.
	No.
	He personally reacted to my video, the Kotaku conundrum, the downfall of gaming journalism.
	I think it was number two.
	It was one of the earlier episodes.
	Yeah.
	What did he say?
	Oh, man.
	He took personal exception to it.
	I was actually surprised.
	I'm like, Stephen Totillo piping in on just some YouTube, because at the time it didn't have that many views.
	I was out in the wilderness doing that series in the beginning.
	Yeah, no one else was paying attention at the time.
	Yeah, he pretty much just threw some random platitude about him not getting it at all at me and then just went on his merry way.
	I wonder if he gets that there was a little more to that argument now.
	I wonder if he understands that I wasn't alone.
	I can't even imagine, to be honest.
	I think that he well, that was the thing.
	They've got a specific kind of culture at these Gorkroffses, and you could tell by the way that they were all talking.
	They all use very similar mannerisms.
	They have their own ideological shorthand.
	Yeah.
	When you're watching someone from Gorka in an interview or something like that, listen out for them saying the word interesting as a response.
	Someone will say something that is a good point, and instead of acknowledging the point or conceding that they're wrong or anything like that, they'll say interesting as if that's a fucking answer.
	And it's just a way of getting out of having to admit, oh, actually, that's me painted into the corner and now I have to change my position.
	Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that Young Turks interview with Girl Writes What?
	That was cool.
	Everything she said every time she nailed him to the wall.
	Interesting.
	Okay.
	Interesting.
	Gotcha.
	And then he starts getting hysterical and accusing her of the business.
	And then he starts speaking in tongues.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	And he's like, go make me a sandwich.
	It's like, Jake, what are you fucking doing?
	You're progressive.
	You know?
	And I love the whole thing about that.
	It's like, if you don't agree with my progressive ideology, I'm going to abandon that progressive ideology and become Bill O'Reilly.
	It's just like, Dang, what are you doing?
	You're the progressive, not her.
	So it's just like, yeah, but anyway, the Gawker thing, they've got on the wall just a big TV screen with all of the articles that are up, and they're all ranked in order of number of clicks.
	And this is cross-site.
	So you've got Jezebel, Kotaku, Gorka, Deadspin, all that sort of stuff.
	And, you know, so it's just a mission for clicks.
	And he's literally going on about how nothing else matters but the clicks.
	That is the metric of success.
	And technically, that would be for any website.
	You know what I mean?
	But for Gorka, it was the abandonment of standards.
	There are no standards.
	There are clicks.
	It doesn't matter what you're saying.
	Which is why, like, someone sent me a link from Gorka of just a picture of some guy naked face fucking Abraham Lincoln's statue or something.
	I'm like, yep, that's exactly.
	It's why Kotaku is running stories about a guy dressed up as Batman on a motorcycle on a Japanese speedway.
	Like, that's a story.
	That's a story, Kotaku, about how French fries are confusing people in Japan.
	Way to really strike at the heart of gaming journalism.
	Way to just nail that.
	And I recognize that Kotaku has their little series of Japanese articles, but every time they do an article on Japan, it's always some kind of fluff.
	The fucking prime minister of Japan is trying to reinstitute Japanese military at this point.
	They're actually in the process of expanding their military powers more than any point since the cessation of World War II.
	And you're talking about an anime schoolgirl statue that you can look up at Skirt.
	Like, fuck.
	And even then, what annoys me about it the most as well is, okay, fine.
	Kotaku, your argument is that, well, we're a gaming site.
	It's okay, great.
	Why are you talking about some guy dressing as Batman then?
	Why aren't you talking about Japanese games?
	I was the same with Polygon.
	I was on there the other day, because my co-developer, Russ, sent me some fucking...
	He ends up getting on to...
	He goes to Polygon, because he thinks it's funny.
	And I'm like, okay, but you shouldn't give him the traffic.
	And he's like, yeah, I know, but I think it's funny.
	I'm like, okay, fine.
	And he goes on there basically to have arguments with progressives.
	Just about, you know, just about anything.
	Absolutely anything.
	And he'll get into massive shit flinging with them.
	But it was, you know, literally, it was the same thing.
	It was like an article about fucking, oh, Batman and stuff like that.
	And it's just like, what are you guys even writing about?
	You know, you're going to make yourselves wildly irrelevant.
	And since we're on the make themselves, come on now.
	You know what I mean?
	The point I always made, though, with fucking Gawker is, okay, Kotaku is going to defend Zoe Quinn because they aired her dirty laundry, which I get.
	I made a video defending her, too.
	I don't think that her personal drama was relevant to it.
	I think we should have been concentrating on Nathan Grayson.
	And for the most part, Games did exactly that, right?
	Which is great.
	I think that was the way to go.
	And that's in the face of Quinn's provocation as well.
	Because Quinn is not some sort of shrinking violet.
	She's not some sort of innocent bunny.
	She knows what she's about, you know?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I never labored under any delusions that she was a shrinking flower.
	Yeah.
	I never believed that, but I did think that the Gamergate movement would be better served by just concentrating on the journalistic thing, concentrating on Nathan Grayson.
	The fact that he still hasn't been ousted from Kotaku, it's a daily slap in the face to gamers.
	It's ridiculous that he got away with what he did.
	And he didn't.
	He only admitted what happened after Stephen Totillo confronted him, which Stephen Totillo's own tweets confirm, which is ridiculous.
	And then it's even more ridiculous that Stephen Totillo just took him at his work and was like, oh, yeah, he said it's not going to happen.
	Master's degree in journalism, master's degree in journalism.
	And he seems, he works with Gorka.
	You would think that those things would be incompatible.
	You would think someone who has a master's degree in journalism, which would obviously involve journalistic ethics, would look at Gorka and say, you know, I don't think I can work for this company.
	You know, but no.
	But just as a quick aside, Lionhead Studios, you know that tweet I showed earlier with the bust?
	They've taken it down.
	And they've issued a skirt.
	I'll read it.
	We apologize for the imagery we shared earlier.
	Diversity and inclusion are values we uphold here.
	We'll reinforce these values with our team.
	Oh my fucking God.
	It's fucking body snatchers.
	We're going to reinforce the hard moral fiber of Lionhead Studios, the game that gave you three-way whore fucking in Fable 2 and freaking.
	I'm going to type that to them.
	Fucking, are you kidding me?
	That's amazing.
	We're actually delivering a scoop right here live on the air.
	That's fantastic.
	Yeah, no, we actually are.
	This is cool.
	But it just unbelievable.
	Lion Head, right?
	And this is something that I keep trying to.
	The point I keep trying to reinforce: you cannot please these people.
	There is never a point where they're happy with what you've done.
	The prime example is an article I had from this week in Stupid last week, which was, I can't remember where it was from, but it was International Women's Day, and Nintendo had put out a bunch of those Rosie the Rifta posters, but with female Nintendo characters on.
	And this website had written an article saying these posters are everything that's wrong with video gaming.
	And it's just like, oh, my fucking lord.
	Are you kidding me?
	They are pandering to you more than anything.
	This is the best they could possibly do is go, hey, you sell off all our female characters.
	They're all feminists.
	That's what they were saying by doing it.
	And yet, no, this is what's wrong with video gaming.
	It's like, oh, fuck off.
	There is no pleasing these people.
	Don't even try.
	Ran over.
	I don't get it.
	I don't get it.
	But that's what I'm talking about.
	Like, Gawker, the entire idea of Gawker defending Zoe Quinn on the basis that her privacy was invaded, as I said, it's ridiculous because how many times has Gawker dropped sex tapes from celebrities that they went to court to justify having invaded this person's privacy?
	They went to Hulk Hogan and for some ridiculous reason actually managed to win for dropping his sex tape, which is ridiculous.
	It was filmed against his will, which I got to believe there's plenty of laws that outlaw that.
	And it was released against his will.
	That's freaking ridiculous.
	Let's just reverse the genders.
	Sorry, I just need to clear my throat.
	Let's reverse the genders.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Imagine if Zoe Quinn's sex tape had been released and that's what had kicked off Gamergate.
	Can you imagine?
	No, no, no.
	Imagine.
	The sky would have fallen.
	Jesus Christ, it would have been the end of the fucking world.
	You know what I mean?
	And so, yeah, this.
	You know what, right?
	What kind of pisses me off about this Lionhead thing is it's not that they've not they've apologized to the social justice warriors and been like, oh, we're so sorry.
	Please forgive us.
	It's, I mean, what did they think was going to happen?
	You know what we're going to do?
	We're going to get this picture of a big titted maid and tweet this out, saying, Hey, happy features day away.
	It's amazing.
	We're kind of acting like this is the first time that companies have been picketed to not be so sexist.
	I remember distinctly as a kid people claiming that Mortal Kombat was sex, Mortal Kombat 3 was sexist because of the plunging necklines of Jade and Katana and Melina and shit.
	And you know what happened?
	Fucking nothing because the publisher of the game stood up and said, We stand behind their artistic vision and we're not backing down.
	When the fuck was the last time you saw that happen in gaming?
	What the fuck?
	I don't know.
	And this brings us on to the Batman cover, the Batgirl cover.
	Sorry.
	Did you see that change the cover thing?
	Yes.
	What did you think?
	Well, okay, I think some of the anger was misdirected because it was directed at the SGWs that were pressuring them to remove it.
	But actually, I honestly think it more came from DC Comics.
	Because DC is, this is like part of a long pattern from DC Comics of pandering to social justice warriors.
	Not pandering to social justice warriors.
	Let's come right the fuck out with it, folks.
	DC Comics are social justice warriors.
	This is the comic company.
	Yeah, I talked about this on Twitter a little bit.
	This is the comic company that pushed a Batwoman who has no character trait apart from the fact that she is a lesbian.
	That is it.
	She has no other discernible character trait.
	And then later on, Dan DeDio admitted in an interview, they essentially did it to grab a headline.
	They did it in 2006 to launch the new 52.
	They figured it would be a good headline and it would sell some comics and it would get them some good press with the LGBT community.
	And that's exactly what happened.
	It worked like a charm.
	They are SJWs.
	They're exploitative SJWs, but they're SJWs.
	They absolutely are.
	It really, I mean, yeah, like you're saying, actually, the Social Justice Warriors were doing what Social Justice Warriors do.
	The Batgirl was, you know, what was something about not having agency.
	And she was vulnerable or whatever.
	That was obviously the sort of thing they're going to complain about.
	But my favorite part of that was.
	Sorry, there was the comment in the comments section.
	Oh, yeah.
	Somebody mentioned, actually, I'm going to drop their name.
	Someone said Marvel are worse, or Marvel isn't doing any better.
	The Dancing Bastards said Marvel isn't doing any better.
	You're absolutely correct.
	I mean, they are totally, they are politically correct as well in a totally different way.
	Marvel recently said, and this is actually because of Disney, largely, which what do you fucking expect?
	It's goddamn Disney.
	Yeah.
	Disney came out and said, like, the smoking ban that's been in effect over at Marvel ever since the days of Joe Quesada being editor-in-chief.
	There can be no smoking in a Marvel comic, at least not in one that isn't a Max comic, which is the adult comics line that they have.
	Now that extends to films and all Disney films, which, you know, not that there was ever a ton of smoking in Star Wars, but they own Star Wars now.
	There can never be smoking in that.
	There can't be smoking in any Marvel movies.
	Wolverine can never light up a smoke.
	That's just how it goes now.
	And no more cigars for Wolverine.
	Across the fucking board, which is just pathetic.
	So I didn't mean to make it seem like DC are all by their lonesome on the political correctness front, but I do think DC take it to a laughable extreme.
	They do.
	But I mean, Marvel, Female Thor.
	Have you seen the screenshots or the photos from the comic books that are going around?
	I have not, no.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, my God.
	They are just the most cringeworthy things, right?
	Literally, I'm actually going to just quickly Google it just so I can read you it verbatim because it's so cringeworthy.
	Hang on.
	It sucks because I enjoy the I believe Olivier Cuapelle is the artist of that comic, and I love his art.
	And he did a Thor comic in 2007 that I thought was great.
	I have a couple posters of it, but it's just so misguided.
	It's just such a standard copy-paste, give him a vagina instead of a dick, and there's your distinguishing feature.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, this is a screen from the comic.
	And he says, sorry, yeah.
	Oh, I'm supposed to call you Thor.
	Damn feminists are ruining everything.
	And it's like, oh, my God.
	Is that really the dialogue you're going with?
	Damn feminists are ruining everything.
	And then it's like, you know, he says, what kind of Thor are you?
	And she's like, the kind who just broke your jaw, pal, or whatever.
	And then passive aggressively in her head, she says, that's for saying feminist like it's a four-letter word, creep.
	And then robbing because apparently he just robbed someone.
	It's like, really, you're more angry at him because he doesn't like that you're a feminist than you are that he's broken the law.
	It's just so cringeworthy.
	It's so cringeworthy.
	It's just like so shoehorned in.
	oh, God, just what's the fucking point, you know?
	And it kind of reminds me of the Alan Heinberg Wonder Woman that came out in 06, 06.
	I actually have a poster of it, not because I enjoyed the comic, but because I enjoy Terry Dodson's art in the comic.
	But they got Alan Heinberg, who is a writer on Gilmore Girls, which we all kind of, anyone who's ever seen Gilmore Girls know that program was very, very, very politically slanted.
	I think at the end of the show, one of the characters winds up working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign, just to give you an idea of how in your face with the political bias they are.
	But yeah, he came on and basically, they were in the middle of a really good run, actually, on Wonder Woman that had gone on till like 2006, and it was really starting to build momentum.
	And this is sort of a long-term pattern with DC Comics.
	Poor Wonder Woman, every time they start to put together a mythology and the book starts to get genuinely interesting, they bring in some gimmicky writer who's usually a woman or some kind of minority so that they can grab a headline and say, oh, now we have a woman writing our comic, or now we have a gay man writing our comic, which was the case here with Alan Heinberg.
	He was hired entirely because he was gay.
	Every headline talking about him being hired, he's a homosexual.
	Why does him being homosexual change Wonder Woman?
	And how is it move forward for you even talking about that?
	Jesus Christ.
	Yeah, and it was like, and then what happens?
	He's a TV writer.
	He has no time to fucking write the comic.
	He puts out like five issues.
	There's a five-month delay between every single issue.
	And what winds up happening?
	Somebody else who actually knows what they're doing winds up taking over the book and the cycle begins again.
	That's the Wonder Woman cycle, sadly.
	I'm not a reader of comics these days.
	I haven't been since I was a kid.
	So I'm pretty sure the loop of them.
	But yeah, that's the thing.
	I don't regret it.
	I mean, I used to really like the Aliens comics.
	When I was about 13, they first came out.
	Oh, man.
	The Dark Horse Alien comics?
	Yeah, I think so.
	Yeah, I think that's the ones.
	Some of the Alien vs. Predator.
	I mean, it's touch and go.
	Some are good and some are bad, but the ones that are good are great.
	Oh, the art in the Aliens comics is just spectacular.
	It's Hicks and Newt.
	They're on a ship.
	I can't remember.
	I haven't read them for about, God, 20 years.
	So I can't exactly remember what happens.
	But I've got them all set at home at my parents' house In the attic or something.
	I should really get them out.
	They're in terrible condition.
	But yeah, they're amazing.
	Absolutely amazing artwork.
	And the comic adaptation of an alien versus predator book in the last story of each comic book.
	She'd have the aliens, the predator, and then the alien versus predator.
	It was fucking amazing.
	It's fucking amazing.
	No, and as anyone who has watched my channel recently can construe within about five fucking seconds.
	I'm a huge Daredevil fan.
	And the show is about to come out.
	So I have a history in comics.
	I've drawn comics.
	I've been paid for it even and had a few published.
	So I'm big into comics.
	But I'm really, this thing is not new.
	This development with what's been going.
	This has been going on for years, guys.
	This is not a new thing.
	It's not the new frontier of feminism.
	This is honestly, this is their frontier.
	They own this territory.
	They've owned it for years.
	Yeah, they are the establishment here.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, there's absolutely no doubt here.
	Yeah, we're on their turf here.
	Yeah, it's a quick look at Arsa.
	Yeah, so that's.
	Oh, man, there's so much shit, isn't there?
	Well, we're 10 minutes from the two-hour mark.
	Why don't we wrap it up with one last story here?
	I wouldn't have to wrap it up.
	I'm just constantly surprised with just how much crap there is to go through.
	It's constant.
	And yet, you know, any of these companies who are being bullied into submission by the social justice warriors, what do they get out of it?
	Are they getting extra sales from it or anything like that?
	I doubt it.
	They're getting a little bit of positive press.
	I mean, they get a little bit of a...
	There'll be a little bit of a pop in mainstream...
	You know, PBS might do or Frontline might do a special spotlight on them or now with that baggy-eyed Bolshevik Bill Moyers or one of those programs or whatever.
	They'll fucking do a special expose on how comics have grown up and so forth.
	And it's like, it's been this way since the fucking 70s.
	Since Denny O'Neill shoehorned his sort of his extremely biased, extremely slanted to the left Pablum in Green Lantern, Green Arrow.
	I mean, that was in the 70s, guys.
	This has been going on a long fucking time.
	One thing recently that I saw is that a lot of the feminist sites are going on, oh, Marvel's feminist Thor is outselling the old Thor's from like 20 years ago or whatever.
	I'm just sat there like, yeah, it's fucking mainstream culture now.
	You know, it is the box office headliner.
	You know, before it was a dorky fucking hobby, you know, a dorky specialist hobbyist thing.
	Now it's the mainstream headline act.
	You know, no wonder.
	Yeah, well, in there, in the defense of that headline, I would say that's probably noteworthy because of how low comic book circulation actually is right now.
	Very few people are actually buying comics, and I don't fucking blame them, quite frankly, given the quality.
	No, no, that's not.
	That's a classic example of what I was talking about.
	It's the Batwoman effect all over again.
	It's, hey, we made this character, a woman, we made this character an X-O-Y-A-Z.
	Spider-Man's black.
	Batwoman is a lipstick lesbian.
	They actually use the term lipstick lesbian, by the way, in press releases for Batwoman, which is just, I find.
	They called Batwoman a lipstick lesbian.
	Yeah, like full-on employed that term, which is like, I mean, some lesbians employ that term, but it's kind of, it's got a slight pejorative connotation to it.
	I've never pejorative.
	I mean, come on.
	Yeah, I never understood why DC was cool with putting that in fucking actual press releases.
	But anyways, so like it's a classic case of, okay, look, we're going to pop our numbers, but it's absolutely going to fall off because it always does.
	It happened with Wonder Woman.
	It's going to happen with this.
	It always happens because it wasn't a creative change that was made for the right reasons.
	Incidentally, that was actually, now you say it.
	I was thinking about it, like, well, of course they're selling more.
	They're mainstream comics.
	But the new Thor comic only sold for like 160,000 copies.
	And yeah, you know, Thor movie, how much are the Thor movies making?
	You know, millions.
	Absolutely millions upon millions upon millions.
	And the comics, 160,000, that's nothing.
	Oh, yeah, and that's a really good print run nowadays.
	I mean, it used to be a million, two million per comic for a while.
	Like, we're talking in the 90s, some of the best print runs of the 80s and stuff.
	Even some from like 2005, 2004 or something, the really, really big comics would hit the million mark.
	Now they're lucky to hit 100,000, 200,000.
	It's like that's a good print run in 2015.
	So that's sort of the state of the comic book industry.
	It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
	But this is, it just goes to the heart of everything that we've been saying.
	These people don't fucking buy comics.
	They don't buy games.
	They're not fucking...
	They're professional whiners who take pleasure in doing nothing but whining.
	they're professional whiners who take pleasure in doing nothing but whining.
	You know, they do not...
	I played through...
	There's a guy called Dan Olson who is a social justice warrior, effectively.
	And he made this game.
	And it's an art house game.
	And it's called Resist.
	And all you do is walk forward in one direction.
	And you either walk far enough and the game crashes or you stop walking and you eventually disappear.
	You're sure this isn't just a reskin of Final Fantasy XIII.
	You're sure.
	I'm sure.
	Because it's not a great reskin.
	But the point is, it's meant to be like an art house game where he's, you know, he's like, this is the terrible disillusionment of life.
	And someone on the, I'm just going to quickly grab the comments because someone made a really good observation.
	Because they're always, they're always talking about meaning and meaningfulness.
	You know, they're always like, oh, this was a meaningful thing.
	This is, you know, like with the meaning of the characters not being able to players not being able to choose the race of their character.
	You know, it's a meaningful thing.
	And I was just looking at it thinking, this is the sort of thing that people who have no meaning in their lives say and do.
	The only meaning that they've got are the identity politics that they obsess over.
	And someone on the comments was like, normal people find meaning in the things that they love, and that's the problem.
	People like the social justice warriors don't love anything, and the only thing they really love are themselves.
	And it's just like, I really think that's true.
	Well, it is the ultimate expression of narcissism to believe that every form of entertainment, that every aberrant psychic twinge that you experience is the result of someone encroaching on your emotional territory.
	And that, oh my God, if they step over that invisible fucking line, then they must die.
	And you were entitled to a recourse as well.
	You're entitled to complain at them and have them change for you.
	That is.
	Absolutely.
	You're entitled to an end result that favors you and specifically how you would like it to happen as well.
	Because if it doesn't happen in exactly the way you like, then you're going to find something else to complain about.
	For example, if a character is turned, there are feminists who are complaining about female Thor because she's just a copy-paste reskin of boobs.
	See what I mean?
	This male trope, isn't it?
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	Of course, I didn't even think about it.
	That was the thing.
	I was looking at these, you know, these stills from the female Thor thinking, wow, this is brazenly feminist.
	It's so in your face, the feminists must be thrilled about this.
	And yet, you know, thinking about it, of course, they're not.
	This is exactly my point.
	You can't fucking please these people.
	There is nothing about identity politics that even vaguely lends itself to being well been.
	I mean, think about it.
	What does it ultimately feed back into?
	What do any politics feed back into?
	What are they feeding?
	What system are they feeding?
	The electoral one.
	The one where somebody gets elected.
	This is the reason people don't understand.
	And this goes for, okay, let's just use the Democrats-Republicans example for the Americans that are listening to this.
	The worst thing that George W. Bush could have done is do one of the things that the right wing of his party wanted him to do and that he promised he was going to do.
	Let's say, for the sake of argument, something to do with immigration.
	The worst thing he could have possibly done is solve that problem.
	Because the moment that problem is solved, there's no more eternally evergreen source of him to soak up their votes because of their discontent.
	Yeah, what's he going to rail against?
	And that's the exact same way with identity politics.
	They don't want equality because the moment they have equality, people no longer have a reason to vote for people like Barack Obama.
	Yeah.
	They no longer have that sponge to milk votes off of.
	Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
	These people seem to only love themselves.
	And there's the common feminist mantra that the personal is political.
	And that's what identity politics is based off of.
	If it's personal to you, which obviously everyone's identity is personal, you need to make that political.
	And so if, I mean, there is no solving that, is there?
	So it would only be if you were the emperor of the world and everyone was doing exactly what you wanted all the time.
	Because, you know, like the guy was saying, they don't love anything.
	You know, I love video games.
	I love, you know, movies.
	I love, you know, history.
	I love these things.
	And so these things have importance to me that supersedes my, you know, my, what I would consider identity politics.
	And so, but these people, they don't really love anything.
	And so the only thing they love are themselves.
	And therefore, this is what they base everything on.
	I'm absolutely certain of it.
	Yeah, completely.
	And they cultivate that.
	The political parties on both sides of the aisle cultivate that mentality.
	The mentality that they are entitled to restitution of some kind, that they are entitled to impose their exact kind of restitution on everyone else.
	You are a bad person if you don't pander to it.
	Yes, that they are eternally disenfranchised because the worst thing an identity politician could possibly do is fix a problem.
	That's the worst thing they could do.
	Because at that moment, they're no longer getting those people's fucking votes.
	Yeah, because it's almost like it's the love of complaining that they do it for you.
	Exactly.
	Once they're not allowed to complain, they're not going to be happy.
	So, yeah, it's basically we've found ourselves in a really some sort of swamp, a quagmire, where there's no going backwards, there's no going forwards, and we're barely managing to stay afloat.
	And yeah, so it's kind of depressing, really, isn't it?
	But what worries me the most is who has programmed these people to think that way?
	Who has done this?
	I think it must be the sort of, you know, the everyone's a winner generation Y.
	Yeah, it's endemic from childhood at this point, but I think where it becomes stratified, I think we could both agree on this is in college.
	Yeah.
	There is definitely an industry of victimhood in college right now.
	It's shocking, frankly.
	And it's what worries me, though, I mean, this is becoming tantamount to abuse, I think.
	I read an article the other day.
	This was again for this week in Stupid.
	It was about a band called Black Pussy.
	And, you know, it's a name they've obviously chosen to piss people off.
	But listening to the feminists who were complaining about it was so telling.
	These black feminists who were like, this is oppressive, obviously.
	You know, as a black woman, I am reduced to nothing but my race and my gender, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And I'm thinking, I bet the person who programmed you with these methods of thought was a white person.
	I bet it was a white person who nine out of ten times, absolutely.
	Exactly.
	Who has put you, you know, like Peggy McIntosh or whoever has written like all this privileged shit.
	You know, they've programmed it into you at university and now you are in an invisible prison.
	You're wearing invisible shackles in your head put on you by white people.
	So you are nothing but a black woman.
	You know, you're nothing more than that in your head, according to you.
	It's that age-old concept of we're going to fight for equality by cordoning people off into their own special minority and ethnic groups.
	And they're going to stay in their little areas.
	And incidentally, they're all going to vote for us.
	But, you know, that's not what's important.
	It's that we're all fighting for you.
	That's what's important.
	Just stay in your little area and continue to funnel your votes our way.
	And everything will eventually be solved, even though it never actually is.
	But what worries me most about it, though?
	I mean, I absolutely think it is for political reasons.
	It absolutely is.
	But what bothers me is, like, what quality of life must someone be having if they can be having a great day?
	You know, everything's going great.
	And then they open the paper and there's a band playing soon called Black Pussy.
	And they're just like, fucking triggered.
	Oh, shit.
	Oh, my God.
	You know, and they start shaking.
	They start crying.
	And then they phone up their local newspaper so they can complain and get a report written so they can make national news out of it.
	Sorry, there's a band called Black Pussy.
	I'm a black woman.
	I'm fucking triggered.
	This makes me feel like a slave.
	And it's just like, that has to be some kind of mental abuse.
	You can ruin someone's day by hearing the name of a band.
	It's just, I just can't even.
	I have no way of understanding what must be going through their head, but they look like they're suffering.
	It's getting to the point where I'm thinking, right, should we just all get a bunch of pillows and smother the social justice warriors to death and just go, shh, it's for the best.
	It's for the best.
	Because, I mean, what else is going to have to happen?
	God knows enough are crouching in their own personal emotional pillow fort, lobbing verbal hand grenades from cover at whoever they construe to be their opponents.
	Anyone who walks by.
	Fucking ableism.
	But that's the thing, isn't it?
	It's one of those things where it's like, I mean, these people are going to have to be deprogrammed, as if they've been in North Korea or something.
	So I think we're fucked, you know.
	So I'm such a doommonger.
	I have one beard and I'm suddenly like, oh, God, everything's awful.
	Sorry, Blade Runner over here, guys.
	Sorry.
	But um yeah should we uh should we wrap it up then?
	Because it's been uh a couple of hours.
	We've got oh yeah, we're hitting the two here and two hour marks, so it seems as good as time it has any.
	Yeah, leave them wanting more, isn't it?
	But yeah, I mean, if you're up for doing this again, I'm up for doing this again.
	Absolutely.
	Thanks for having me.
	It was a gay old time.
	Maybe not full-blown gay, but at a bare minimum, my curious old time.
	No, it absolutely was.
	Honestly, man, it was a pleasure.
	And I think everyone enjoyed it.
	And well, I guess we'll see you all later.
	Do you want to talk us out?

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