Where it starts to get really interesting for the crazy people is that discussion of the incident starts to get censored. Threads get locked and deleted. Threads asking "why can't we talk about this?" get locked and deleted. Threads that want to discuss the meta-issues get locked and deleted. Threads that want to talk about the issues without naming names get locked and deleted.
Not just on the respectable sites.
Stuff got locked and deleted on *4CHAN*.
"But, wait!", you may be saying to yourself. "I thought that 4chan was a cesspool of unmoderated adolescents that posted vile stuff without worry!"
That's what the people at 4chan thought too... and they started getting *REALLY* interested in why they couldn't talk about it.
And so they started going to places where it was possible to talk about it... and talk about why they couldn't talk about it elsewhere.
And people started digging up that a lot of the people involved in the malpractice knew each other and had known each other for a long time.
And then, on August 28th, there was the famous "Gamers Are Dead" media blitz.
Nine different popular media outlets all posted stories about how "Gaming", as an identity, was done. How the old audience was passe and the new audience is the one that game developers should target games to in the future.
Over the next few days, more of these articles showed up.
The response was not something like "holy crap, I guess gaming as a hobby has changed" but "THESE GUYS ARE COORDINATING STORIES NOW?!?!? HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED IN THIS?!?!?"
And the gamers in question really started digging and digging and digging even more.
At this point I'm more than happy enough to pause and ask
"Do you see why some people might see Gamergate as a precursor to what happened with Trump?"
Antonio Delgado, the NY Lt. Governor, has announced that he's going to run for Governor.
Governor Hochul has totally ripped into Antonio Delgado and she publicly announced, via her communications director Anthony Hogrebe, that she's looking for a new running mate when she runs for Governor again.
Delgado is probably better at complaining about crime that Hochul will be, but it's not like either will be able to run as an outsider.
The cheating on her boyfriend? I believe that she never did. It was mostly of the form "Mistakes may have been made but it was abusive of him to talk about it in a public forum" and that sort of thing. If you've ever witnessed a bad breakup, it was rebuttals of the form "maybe I did a small bad thing but he did a large bad thing by reacting poorly to my small bad thing".
She also wrote a book called "Crash Override" but that was more about the aftermath than the whole "mistakes were made" thing.
If you think that it's obvious that they were ticked off that she self-published a homemade game via the self-publishing homemade game distribution website to the point where you think that any lay reader would agree with you, I'd ask you to step back and consider, just consider, that maybe their complaint was something else.
It wasn't that she made a game.
It wasn't that she published it on the website made to distribute homemade games.
It has to do, among other things, with The Zoe Post and the information contained therein.
But once you acknowledge *THAT*...
Well, there's a *LOT* of stuff that gets reframed even if you believe that 90% of the info in that post is obvious self-serving pap.
Does it muddy it enough to make you say "huh... it makes absolutely *ZERO* sense that their complaint would be what I said it was..."?
From there, which of these do you go to next?
1. "That just goes to prove how awful they are."
2. "Maybe they had a different complaint. One that was (marginally) less silly? Maybe? I mean, just as sexist and racist, of course... but one that would make more sense in context."
You see "Gamergate" as "that time that a bunch of guys told Zoe Quinn to kill herself".
And that's what "Gamergate" is to you.
You can't imagine someone looking at Gamergate and seeing something else.
So let me draw another analogy.
How fair would it be for me to call you an ally of Tommy Crooks? And so whenever we're discussing Trump, I bring up how I'm not a big fan of Tommy Crooks or his methods.
Or Luigi, for that matter. Heck, let's put Luigi in the same bundle of The Resistance.
Even as a 3rd Party Voter, I can't align myself with Tommy Crooks or Luigi and I don't see how you can and do so enthusiastically.
My experience of Gamergate isn't from someone who read the wikipage but from someone who thinks that the argument dates back to Mass Effect 3.
So, from my experience, there was a *LOT* of interaction between the disciples of Knute with the disciples of Marv for years and years.
And one of the criticisms levied against Marv's disciples is that they stopped buying tickets to the games.
All in all, the analogy breaks down quickly.
I mostly wanted it to get you to say "yeah, 'sane' and 'sense' are socially constructed and my assumption of their definitions may not match those from other societies or even those from different parts of my own".
Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3's horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they'd never drop another cent on Bioware.
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it's at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying "my day is half over, here's what I've got".
Eh, it's no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn't make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there's a lot of stuff that just won't make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
There are people out there, essential people!, who cannot answer the question "what do you do here?"
Michael Cain notes that there are the engineering types who spend a week thinking about how to answer a question.
I've met these people. They're uncanny and I don't know that I've ever met one who was paid what they were worth.
It's when someone shifts to "therefore, the people who work for the Federal Government are like this", I'd say "whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold up there, Tex."
I believe someone at Bell Labs is like that. I'm not sure that someone at USAID is like that. I'd enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at Treasury might be like that. I would *REALLY* enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be like that.
If you want to tell me that each Federal Department has 5% of people whose job it is to deal with intangible imponderables that have zero deliverables, I suppose I'd shrug and say "okay, yeah... life's like that".
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Okay. Yeah. That's the starting point.
Where it starts to get really interesting for the crazy people is that discussion of the incident starts to get censored. Threads get locked and deleted. Threads asking "why can't we talk about this?" get locked and deleted. Threads that want to discuss the meta-issues get locked and deleted. Threads that want to talk about the issues without naming names get locked and deleted.
Not just on the respectable sites.
Stuff got locked and deleted on *4CHAN*.
"But, wait!", you may be saying to yourself. "I thought that 4chan was a cesspool of unmoderated adolescents that posted vile stuff without worry!"
That's what the people at 4chan thought too... and they started getting *REALLY* interested in why they couldn't talk about it.
And so they started going to places where it was possible to talk about it... and talk about why they couldn't talk about it elsewhere.
And people started digging up that a lot of the people involved in the malpractice knew each other and had known each other for a long time.
And then, on August 28th, there was the famous "Gamers Are Dead" media blitz.
Nine different popular media outlets all posted stories about how "Gaming", as an identity, was done. How the old audience was passe and the new audience is the one that game developers should target games to in the future.
Over the next few days, more of these articles showed up.
The response was not something like "holy crap, I guess gaming as a hobby has changed" but "THESE GUYS ARE COORDINATING STORIES NOW?!?!? HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED IN THIS?!?!?"
And the gamers in question really started digging and digging and digging even more.
At this point I'm more than happy enough to pause and ask
"Do you see why some people might see Gamergate as a precursor to what happened with Trump?"
"
Kathleen Kennedy will reportedly retire by the end of this year.
"
It's a different perspective. Nothing more.
"
Antonio Delgado, the NY Lt. Governor, has announced that he's going to run for Governor.
Governor Hochul has totally ripped into Antonio Delgado and she publicly announced, via her communications director Anthony Hogrebe, that she's looking for a new running mate when she runs for Governor again.
Delgado is probably better at complaining about crime that Hochul will be, but it's not like either will be able to run as an outsider.
NOT THE WAY THAT CUOMO WILL BE ABLE TO
"
To what part?
The cheating on her boyfriend? I believe that she never did. It was mostly of the form "Mistakes may have been made but it was abusive of him to talk about it in a public forum" and that sort of thing. If you've ever witnessed a bad breakup, it was rebuttals of the form "maybe I did a small bad thing but he did a large bad thing by reacting poorly to my small bad thing".
She also wrote a book called "Crash Override" but that was more about the aftermath than the whole "mistakes were made" thing.
"
Say what you will about defund, trans stuff, and DEI, you certainly can't make the accusation that they're "counter-revolutionary"!
Something that you *CAN* say about Chait and Noah Smith.
"
If you think that it's obvious that they were ticked off that she self-published a homemade game via the self-publishing homemade game distribution website to the point where you think that any lay reader would agree with you, I'd ask you to step back and consider, just consider, that maybe their complaint was something else.
It wasn't that she made a game.
It wasn't that she published it on the website made to distribute homemade games.
It has to do, among other things, with The Zoe Post and the information contained therein.
But once you acknowledge *THAT*...
Well, there's a *LOT* of stuff that gets reframed even if you believe that 90% of the info in that post is obvious self-serving pap.
"
But even if they didn’t vote for Trump, they’ve contributed to his win rhetorically.
Yes.
Oh, yes. Let's hit them with Article 58.
"
"I remain on standby per the direction of my direct supervisor Supervisor Smith under the approval of my manager Manager Jones. See attached."
"
Does it muddy it enough to make you say "huh... it makes absolutely *ZERO* sense that their complaint would be what I said it was..."?
From there, which of these do you go to next?
1. "That just goes to prove how awful they are."
2. "Maybe they had a different complaint. One that was (marginally) less silly? Maybe? I mean, just as sexist and racist, of course... but one that would make more sense in context."
"
It was a free game that was published to a free game distribution site.
There are literally tens of thousands of games (and "games") that are downloadable from this distribution site.
I don't know if that fact means that we're on the right track or the wrong one, though.
"
OH! I think I see part of the problem.
You see "Gamergate" as "that time that a bunch of guys told Zoe Quinn to kill herself".
And that's what "Gamergate" is to you.
You can't imagine someone looking at Gamergate and seeing something else.
So let me draw another analogy.
How fair would it be for me to call you an ally of Tommy Crooks? And so whenever we're discussing Trump, I bring up how I'm not a big fan of Tommy Crooks or his methods.
Or Luigi, for that matter. Heck, let's put Luigi in the same bundle of The Resistance.
Even as a 3rd Party Voter, I can't align myself with Tommy Crooks or Luigi and I don't see how you can and do so enthusiastically.
What am I missing?
"
"If"
How often do you find situations where there is only one side of the story and that one side is captured accurately by Wikipedia?
"
That's the only essay you could comprehend a pro-GG person writing about Gamergate? "Why it would be okay to send threats to Zoe Quinn"?
If that's the only essay you can imagine being written, I imagine that the other side strikes you as not only crazy but downright evil.
"
Yeah, quite a bit.
If I wrote an essay, would you read it?
"
My experience of Gamergate isn't from someone who read the wikipage but from someone who thinks that the argument dates back to Mass Effect 3.
So, from my experience, there was a *LOT* of interaction between the disciples of Knute with the disciples of Marv for years and years.
And one of the criticisms levied against Marv's disciples is that they stopped buying tickets to the games.
All in all, the analogy breaks down quickly.
I mostly wanted it to get you to say "yeah, 'sane' and 'sense' are socially constructed and my assumption of their definitions may not match those from other societies or even those from different parts of my own".
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
Any existential probability that requires scientific notation is a probability that I am comfortable with.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
That really sucks, man. It's total B.S. I hate that I have to put pants on now.
You have my sympathies.
"
Yeah. I see it as dating back all the way to Mass Effect 3's horrible ending when the player base got really upset about the game/ending and Bioware had to start really locking down their comment threads and eventually shut down their forums in order to avoid the toxicity of the fanbase.
And Inquisition sold like hotcakes despite all of the chuds who said that they'd never drop another cent on Bioware.
"
54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.
Man, hybrid schedules are where it's at. If you wake up at 4AM, you should be able to start working on the stuff you can and then get dressed and go into work at 8 and show up for your scrum saying "my day is half over, here's what I've got".
"
Eh, it's no so difficult to wrap your head around the meta.
Imagine two football teams. One has a coach that learned football back in the 1920s as an assistant to Knute Rockne.
Another has a coach that learned football back in the 1990s as an assistant to Marv Levy.
The coach who learned under Knute is likely to think that the coach who learned under Marv was insane and running plays that didn't make *ANY* sense. Pure madness.
If you have a narrow window, there's a lot of stuff that just won't make sense to you and will strike you as nuts.
"
Consumer revolts, man.
If we've learned anything, we've learned to have the modern audience in place *BEFORE* we abandon the old one.
"
Your definition of "sane" is too narrow.
"where do you even begin to try to counter such a nonsensical thing?"
I'd definitely support going out of your way to trying to think nonsensically as a first step. "Sense" may be holding you back as much as "sane" is.
"
What if we thought that Gamergate was a failed run on the part of a particular social movement that telegraphed all of the coming drama and showed the playbook that the future political fights would be using and, as such, gave away how to fight against this social movement in the future against such movements as the one pushing Harris for president in 2024 thus making Trump 47 possible?
Oh, it's Amanda Marcotte.
Not even.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
There are people out there, essential people!, who cannot answer the question "what do you do here?"
Michael Cain notes that there are the engineering types who spend a week thinking about how to answer a question.
I've met these people. They're uncanny and I don't know that I've ever met one who was paid what they were worth.
It's when someone shifts to "therefore, the people who work for the Federal Government are like this", I'd say "whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, hold up there, Tex."
I believe someone at Bell Labs is like that. I'm not sure that someone at USAID is like that. I'd enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at Treasury might be like that. I would *REALLY* enjoy hearing why 95% of those who work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be like that.
If you want to tell me that each Federal Department has 5% of people whose job it is to deal with intangible imponderables that have zero deliverables, I suppose I'd shrug and say "okay, yeah... life's like that".
Hell, make it 20%. 25%!!!
What about the other 75%?