- Brita filters can get moldy.
- More later
One summer vacation, I had a racist dog
When I was a kid, our dog was racist as hell. The only black person she ever encountered was the meter man who would invade her yard once a month to check our water usage. So when we took a road trip many years later, we were going through downtown Atlanta and she was flipping her shit. It was an entire city of meter men.
Why are gaming nerds so terrible?
I’m apparently spending a lot of time wondering about the psychology of terrible people.
I am late to this and only catching up but the misogynistic storm raging in the gaming world about indie game dev Zoe Quinn is insane and terrifying. It’s not the first time this has happened and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s always depressing to remember that something you love so much can have such a disgusting and toxic culture.
But why the hell is gaming so uniquely ugly in this regard? The world of entertainment is a misogynistic place. In competitive fields where individuals are vying for attention (such as film or electronic music), women are generally paid much less or consistently overlooked. It’s quiet, effective and nasty. Video games, apparently, are a different bag of oranges. Why can’t they just quietly drown women’s dreams like everyone else? Why does it have to be so incredibly explosive and violent?
I have a guess, and it ties into what is basically the unraveling of traditional nerd culture.
Ideas for Free! Ghosts vs. Zombies
Zombies are dead, right? As in, ceased to be living, they are corpses just shambling along without their resident spirit, waiting to be put down by some nerd in a fedora or whatever. Whether it’s the old zombies and being done by magic, or new zombies and being done by infection, they’re dead.
So a bunch of people get turned into zombies, but they still have shit they never did, so now they’re ghosts, yeah? And they see their own dead bodies going around being assholes, so they decide they have to do something about it. This is a great idea, guys.
But I hate zombies so I want somebody else to write it. Fuck.
And This Is What We Call Progress?
If you don’t like the Besnard Lakes, then, well, you’re probably most of everybody, but I reserve rights to judgment. I feel like most people have a band they wish everyone knew, and this one is mine.
I love that bass so, so much.
What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?
Most of my thinking on the continuing brutality in Ferguson, MO. #Ferguson has been less about the protests themselves and more about what on earth the police might be thinking. Their behavior has been not just ruthless, but so consistently bizarre and they are clearly operating in a different world from everyone else. Their frame of reference has to be completely different from that of everyone on the outside.
But yesterday, after some short and inexplicable peace when the police took a breather, they were back at it, this time breaking out LRAD sound cannons, and I think I figured something out. Looking at the protest section of the Wikipedia article, a few of the American incidents have something in common: they’re protests organized against very large institutions. Two of the deployments were against a G20 meeting and against Occupy protestors. It was also deployed but not used at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
And here’s where I think the fault is: the Ferguson Police Department things that this is one of those. They think people are raging against the machine, and they just need to be scared away and everything will go back to normal, and the freaks will be beaten back into their little holes. What they don’t seem to fully understand is that the institution being protested is them.
Continue reading “What do the Ferguson police even think they’re doing?”