Category: Uncategorized

Diversity = military occupation

France occupies itself:

As the threat of attacks by Islamist extremists remains high in France, President Francois Hollande has decided to continue the deployment of 10,000 troops on the streets across the country.

“The threat of terrorist attack against our country remains high. The head of state has decided to maintain the level of the army on the national territory at 10,000 troops in support of security forces from the Interior Ministry,” Hollande’s office said in a statement after a meeting of senior ministers, AFP reported.

A total of 7,000 troops will be monitoring and protecting religious buildings that are “particularly threatened,” the statement added. Among other sites that are being patrolled by the troops are stations, media buildings and various other possible targets for terrorists. The move comes almost two months after deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s headquarters and a kosher shop in Paris left 17 people dead.

At some point, someone in France is going to realize that if you’re going to pay for 10,000 troops to militarily occupy your own nation, it would be considerably more effective to use all those troops to repatriate the group of people responsible for making the occupation necessary.

And that’s assuming they lean towards the more civilized option, which has historically not always been the case in France.

We are fighting back

Reggie at Reaxxion explains how SJWs are putting women out of work.

 PAX banned booth babes from their events and they are just one of many events including E3 to start banning booth babes. This is an excerpt of what PAX had to say on their booth babe policy:

PAX has a strict ‘no booth babe’ policy with the purpose of creating an environment where everyone can feel comfortable and welcome, and the focus is on games, not hired booth staff.

Booth babes are defined as staff of ANY gender used by exhibitors to promote their products at PAX by using overtly sexual or suggestive methods. Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4” above the knee are not allowed. If for any reason an exhibit and/or its contents are deemed objectionable to PAX management, the exhibitor will be asked to alter the attire of its staff.

Cosplayed characters that are playable in-game are an exception to this rule (within reason), and exhibitors must obtain permission from show management prior to the show.

As Reggie points out, cosplayers shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief, because it’s obvious they are next. Hot women make not-hot women uncomfortable, therefore they must be banned.  As Game Dev newsletter subscribers already know, Alpenwolf has bravely responded to this attack on women by adding a female character to First Sword and making her the face of the game.

About more in the near future. “Morwyn Shadowsong” is already scheduled to be featured in a photoshoot for a popular men’s site and will also be appearing in miniature, cartoon, and 3D formats. She will also be the protagonist of a novella, The Gladiator’s Song, which will be published later this year by Castalia House.

Relativists regret consequences of relativism

It is becoming increasingly obvious that abandoning traditional Christian moral values comes at a very heavy societal cost. Unfortunately, even those who belatedly recognize this can’t quite bring themselves to do the obvious and call for a return to the traditional white Christian civilization of Western Christendom:

The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.

There is no easy way out. Humanity is not going to magically, or rationally, invent a better moral system than those that a) were handed down from on high, or if you prefer, b) evolved through trial-and-error. In light of the failure of secularism and multiculturalism, the nations of the West are going to embrace some past moral structure, absolutist judgments and all.

The only question is if it will be pagan or Christian. And the former is considerably less pretty than its historically ignorant proponents understand.

Interview with a legend

Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, is one of my all-time favorite people in the game industry and one of the individuals I most respect on the planet. He’s written one very good book with Rusel DeMaria on the history of the industry, and I’m hoping to get another one out of him for Castalia House.

Like a lot of the old school game industry people, Johnny is more than a one-trick pony; in addition to being a professor at DePaul University, he’s also a theologian and a pastor. The whole Gamasutra interview from 2012 is fascinating, but in light of #GamerGate, I found these two answers to be particularly prescient.

Was there any moment that made you realize game journalism had finally reached the main stream?

Considering the shoddy state of mainstream journalism today (even some once-great newspapers are pure sell-outs), I guess we reached that bottom rung level a long time ago. I know that when I was editor, I had definite ideals of serving the reader, avoiding conflict-of-interest, and getting behind the corporate facades and into the real stories. The truth is that I don’t know of any modern publications—analog or digital—that have those ideals.

Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?

No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.

My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”

But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.

The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.

Go read the reviews from the older CGW issues sometime. The difference between the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge possessed by the writers then versus the writers of today is astonishing. The dirty little secret of the SJWs in game journalism today is that they don’t actually know very much about games, which is why they always lean towards using their nominal game reviews and articles as a platform for non-gaming issues.

I wrote for both Electronic Entertainment and Computer Gaming World, and writing for the latter was always rigorous. Chris Lombardi not only sent my first review back to me for re-writing, but rejected an article on games as the realization of the Wagnerian concept of Total Art that later appeared in a BenBella SmartPop book. The most notable thing CGW had that most modern game sites lack was integrity.

He’s on a manic swing again

I always enjoy McRapey’s manic phases. That’s when he produces his most amusing quotes and you get a clear glimpse at how messed up and insecure he is. He’s apparently been feeling his oats lately, so he decided another shot at #GamerGate was in order, which promptly led to him feeling insecure after a number of #GamerGaters wondered who the hell he was:

4 NYT Best sellers. 3 Hugos. 3 TV series currently in development. Books in 20 languages. CLEARLY, public opinions have hampered my career.

(I should note that two of those Hugos were awarded to me, essentially, FOR having opinions in public. So.)

GamerGater: YOU ARE TERRIBLE FOR TELLING ME NOT TO READ YOUR BOOKS AND I WILL NEVER READ THEM NOW Me: Ate a lot of lead paint as a kid, huh?

Lots of GGers smugly asking who I am because they’ve never heard of me. Of course not, you’d have to be literate for that, lads.

It’s amusing how Johnny can’t open his mouth without trying to spin the narrative. I mean, full credit for admitting that two of the Hugos were political in nature, but we all know that all THREE of them actually were. There is not a single person on the planet who genuinely believes Redshirts was the best science fiction novel of 2013 in any sense of the term. Including McRapey himself.

And the idea that anyone who is literate has heard of John Scalzi is hilarious. I live in Europe. I know many highly literate people. Absolutely NONE of them have ever heard of him. We have over 100 players at the adult level. Ender has a game this weekend, so between that and practice next week, I should see everyone. I’ll report back on how many of these literate and multilingual Europeans have ever heard of “the science fiction writer John Scalzi”.

It’s also funny that Scalzi thinks he’s big time because he can sell up to 150k books per shot with Tor pushing him as hard as it can. He’s trying to break into the game industry, where games that have 17 million active players are still practically unknown to the game journalists as well as everyone who doesn’t play in that particular genre.

One more amusing note. Back in 2012, someone named CDaniell claimed I was jealous of Scalzi. His words are even funnier today, now that we know what we know about SF’s biggest con artist.

I did have a chance to read up a bit on Mr. Scalzi. So: The SFWA presidency, the Hugo nominations, the ascendancy to the the New York Times best seller list, the 50,000 visitors-a-day blog and a novel being adapted to film with Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct? Goodness. Talk about an Alpha who can seriously put the bread on the table. 

The film was canceled, the 50,000 visitors a day was proven to be a lie, the fan writer nominations are now an award and a Best Novel award that is a historic embarrassment, and the NYT bestsellers show every sign of being nothing more than his publisher gaming the list.

The NYT pumps anti-GamerGate

It’s amazing how the mainstream media thinks they can just blatantly lie about easily verified facts and control the narrative thereby:

Originally intended as a short about the indie game scene in Mr. Francois’s native Australia, “GameLoading” soon transformed into a feature about indie developers worldwide. Among the interviewees are Ms. Quinn, who created the free, text-driven interactive fiction game Depression Quest in 2013. Instead of battling dragons and demons, players fight clinical depression. Ms. Quinn’s creation enraged some gamers, who objected to its subject matter and to the fact that, like more conventional video games, it was being released on Steam, a popular digital store. Anonymous trolls sent her rape and death threats and posted her home address and phone numbers online, prompting her to relocate.

Mr. Francois has struggled to understand why fans of mainstream games would feel threatened by an indie like Depression Quest, since they’re hardly in competition with one another for fans. “The reality is, we’re going to see more games, and more variety of games. Obviously, Activision isn’t going to kill off their first-person shooters.”

It’s not that hard, Mr. Francois. No one is threatened by Depression Quest. But everyone was furious that a bunch of game journos tried to claim it was a great game, then conspired to hide the fact that some of them had personal connections to Quinn.

As for Activision, there is this out of Redmond:

In an interview dating back to late last year, Bonnie Ross, the woman in charge of stewarding and developing the blockbuster HALO franchise, stated that her goal in managing the franchise was to increase the diversity of characters appearing in the games produced by Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries. She further reinforced her position on women in the gaming industry by stressing the importance of hiring more female game developers and giving them role models to aspire to within the industry.

Ms. Ross’s influence has already been heavily felt within the HALO canon: she is the executive responsible for tearing up the original script for HALO 4, which featured women as villainous characters, and forcing a complete rewrite to include stronger female protagonists.

So, do they seriously struggle to understand or are they just disingenuous? We know perfectly well that Ross will turn HALO into the tale of a female Master Chief torn between her love between two soldiers if given the opportunity. While there’s nothing wrong with that per se, male gamers don’t want that in their games. If they did, they’d be reading Twilight.

This is Christian leadership

The nations of Europe are throwing off the poisoned dream of multiculturalism. And I don’t think it is an accident that it is those who successfully survived decades of socialism that are the first to clearly recognize the evils of diversity. From the Prime Minister of Hungary’s State of the Nation address:

The Honourable Chair has mentioned wiseacre analysts who take the view that the concept of a civic Hungary (i.e. one based on Christian-democratic, conservative principles) is merely a political product, and that this has somewhat shaken the faith of the members of our political community. I understand the concerns, but I hope for more self-confidence from Reformed Church pastors, let alone ministers. For our flag is flying high; everyone can see that. Everyone can see that we are a people’s party community, based on Christian-democratic foundations – the ideal, guiding star of which is a civic Hungary. I do not think that this would change in the next hundred years….

Hungary gave its own answers to the most important European questions in
2010. Already since 2010, we have been living in the future which many
other countries are only just setting out towards or will attempt to
reach sooner or later. Europe today continues to huddle behind the moats
of political correctness, and has built a wall of taboos and dogmas
around itself. In contrast, we took the view that the old pre-crisis
world will not return. There are things from past periods which are
worth keeping, such as democracy – as far as possible in a form which
needs no modifying adjectives; but we must let go of everything that has
failed and has broken down. We must let go of these things before they
bury us beneath them. We have chosen the future. Those who do not make
choices find that instead circumstances will make the choices for them.
Those who do not actively decide will find that their lives will be
decided for them. We therefore let go of neo-liberal economic policy,
and perhaps we did so as late as we possibly could have; we let go of
the policy of austerity, just before we were about to share the fate of
Greece; we let go of the delusion of the multicultural society before it
turned Hungary into a refugee camp, and we let go of liberal social
policy which does not acknowledge the common good and denies Christian
culture as the natural foundation – and perhaps the only natural
foundation – for the organization of European societies. We decided to
face the barrage of unfair attacks and accusations, and also let go of
the dogma of political correctness.

And as far as I see it,
Hungarian people are by nature politically incorrect – in other words,
they have not yet lost their common sense.

What a tragedy that the USA does not have such a leader. What a tragedy that we don’t even have a nation for such a leader to address.

Immigration as weapon

Still convinced that immigration is not invasion? Greece is rather convincingly threatening the use of immigrants as a weapon to hold Europe financial hostage. Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said:

“If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State, too.”

European Union finance chiefs are currently debating whether to continue a bailout plan, with Germany a deciding vote.

“If they strike us, we will strike them,” the official said. “We will give to migrants from everywhere the documents they need to travel in the Schengen area, so that the human wave could go straight to Berlin.”

It’s a brilliant move, hanging the European Union on the gallows of its own rhetoric about the sanctity of the free movement of peoples. In one fell swoop, Greece can rid itself of all its invaders and hit the EU much harder than if it had an actual army. In fact, it’s a great strategic move whether the EU comes through with the cash or not.

Either way, it is putting the lie to the EU’s suicidal policy on immigrants and Islam.

“It just makes sense”

Parody is the homage rhetoric pays to dialectic:

Star Wars is getting its first lesbian character. Paul S Kemp has revealed that he is adding the mystery woman to his upcoming novel Lords of the Sith, the next instalment in the official sci-fi canon due out on 28 April.

Little is known about her, but “nerd news” blog Big Shiny Robot has dropped a few hints about what fans can expect.

“Moff Mors is an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes, but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure,” a recent post reads. “She also happens to be a lesbian.”

Shelly Shapiro, editor of the Star Wars books, explaining that including a lesbian character “just makes sense”.

“There’s a lot of diversity…there should be diversity in Star Wars,” she said. “You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognise that there’s a lot of diversity in humans.

And yet, we won’t find any Muslims in Star Wars despite there being a billion of them. We won’t find any Christians in Star Wars despite there being nearly two billion of them. How many Chinese, serial killers, and Green Bay Packers fans will we find? But More Muff (how very clever) just happens to be a lesbian.

It certainly didn’t take Disney long to gay it up. I’m very glad that I lost all interest in Star Wars about ten minutes into The Phantom Menace. If there is one thing you can count on, it is that once SJWs get involved in something, it’s just a matter of time before it is ruined. At this rate, they’ll have Han Solo transitioning in the second new film and we’ll learn that Luke and Leia got married despite knowing they were brother and sister.

Reddit aGGros busted

Reaxxion has the news of a big leak proving Reddit’s anti-GamerGate bias:

Reddit, an internet social news aggregator based in San Francisco, has recently had a monster leak from their moderator chatroom. It is purported that this leak came from a disgruntled user, who dumped the contents of the whole #modleak channel to pro-gamer media. This leak entails a lengthy chat log which captured conversations from September 15th 2013 to February 17th 2015….

Here is a chatlog of /r/Gaming mods talking about filtering the
submission of new threads. Any of these words in the title will trigger
the auto-delete function. Notice the high anti gamer-gate slant in the
mod list. The biggest gaming subreddit has been caught red-handed trying
to stifle gamergate.

I’ve never used Reddit much myself, but it is now abundantly clear that, like Wikipedia, it is SJW-occupied territory and therefore unreliable.