Tag: freakshow

A lethal attack

Frankly, I’m astonished @Spacekatgal hasn’t cried rape yet. But give her time, she’ll probably be babbling about her fear of alien abduction or the Yakuza by the end of next week.

Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal
I want to be crystal clear – I am scared of the death threats I’ve gotten. I am terrified of the #gamergate blame-the-victim witch hunt.

Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal
Getting attacked by @voxday is like having Jesus Christ come to your door and tell you you’re a great person.

Attacked? This should suffice to demonstrate why no one with any sense finds “the death threats” to be credible, here is my supposed attack on her.

“@Spacekatgal That’s cool. We’ll keep not playing them. And not listening to you.”

Feel the terror! Quiver before the rage! Call the police, clearly a madman is about! IT’S JUST LIKE HALLOWEEN AND THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE COMBINED!!!!!

Anyhow, just to make it clear that my position concerning @Spacekatgal is one of utter Olympian indifference, I was sure to clarify it.

Froonium Driven ‏@Froonium_Drive
All the crap happening to @Spacekatgal says he isn’t wrong this time. 

@Froonium_Drive @Spacekatgal
Hey, I don’t support this anti-transgender hate being directed at @Spacekatgal. I just ignore her.

@Spacekatgal If not playing your 1 game and not caring about your opinion is “getting attacked”, the entire game industry is attacking you.

I have no problem whatsoever with women making games for women. Hell, I designed a game for women; it’s called HOT DISH and THQ did pretty well with it a while back. But I have no interest in playing those games, just as all the “gamer grrrls” have zero interest in Advanced Squad Leader and games that I like to play.

As I used to tell the venture capitalists who hired me to look at various investment possibilities in the game sector, games for women already exist and the biggest one is called “Facebook”. Games are just interfaces, and women collect “likes” the same way men rack up “kills”.

This amused me. These SJW morons can’t even manage to avoid tripping over their own hypersensitivities.

Richard Stelling added you to list rjstelling/massive-cunts 

Yeah, Richard, that’s not exactly the way to go about white-knighting for your feministas.

Sex is a choice and age is just a number

If they think they’ve got problems now, just wait until the transagist freaks get into the act:

It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in the local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”

The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.

It appears to have worked. More than 100 community members flooded a meeting this week near Minneapolis, and thousands more sent e-mails. In response, the quasi-public body governing high school sports in Minnesota decided to delay a vote on a new policy covering sports participation by transgender students. Members of the board of directors said they needed more time to study the issue.

The policy, which they now plan to vote on in December, was an attempt to grapple with a question that has bedeviled many states: How do you deal with the growing number of children identifying as transgender who want to participate in the highly gender-specific worlds of high school sports and extracurricular activities?

The whole debate is blitheringly idiotic. There is no such thing as “transgender”. There are male psychological freaks pretending to be women and female psychological ruins pretending to be men. That’s it. Punto.

And to anyone who wants to argue otherwise, I will simply point out that I feel that I am 16 years old and fully eligible to play high school sports, and anyone who argues otherwise is transagist. After all, it should be obvious that the year of birth recorded on one’s birth certificate means no more than one’s sex recorded there, and “age” is nothing more than a social construct.

I know it’s hard to understand and there is a lot of controversy around
this, but to be misaged as a middle-aged man when you are actually a teenage boy
is incredibly offensive.

Other transaged feel that they are 65 and therefore legally eligible to collect Social Security. It would be outrageous to deny them their right to do so. The amusing thing about the Left is that they subscribe to all this ludicrous anti-definitional nonsense, and then turn around and call themselves “the reality-based community”. The truth is that their only connection to reality is their mass rejection of it combined with an enthusiastic embrace of perversion.

Video Game Sex War

There’s a headline for you. It’s pretty obvious that the anti-game women are alarmed and in retreat when they are running to the international media for support simply because Zoe Quinn was exposed as a whore taking advantage of corruption in the world of independent game journalism:

Evil women are coming to take away your computer games. At least, that’s the message that a group of angry young men have been articulating on the internet in the past few weeks. According to them, these games – once a haven for socially awkward teenage boys – are being ruined by the monstrous regiment….

This online explosion grew from two separate, though connected, incidents. The
first was the success of a series of videos made by the blogger Anita
Sarkeesian, called Tropes vs Women, which explored the portrayal of women in
video games (generally submissive and for decoration). When she launched a
crowdfund appeal for the project in 2012, she raised $150,000 more than she
asked for, but also unleashed a vicious campaign of sustained harassment.
Hackers tried to gain access to her social media accounts and she was
bombarded with tweets and emails threatening her with rape and death. A few
weeks ago, she had to leave her home because she feared for her safety.

While this was going on, a game developer called Zoe Quinn also became the
target of abuse, when her former boyfriend posted online accusations of
infidelity: he claimed she had cheated on him with a games journalist. A few
impressionable young men decided that this was their opportunity to end
“corruption” in games journalism once and for all. They bombarded Quinn with
abuse and threats, insisting that their anger was about press ethics – she
had traded sexual favours for good reviews – rather than misogyny. It turned
out that the journalist in question had not even reviewed Quinn’s game.

While many of the men involved in these incidents are undoubtedly motivated by
sexism and sadism – there is a nasty trend on the internet to abuse women
per se – they are right about one thing: women are coming to take away their
computer games…. [A]s video games are increasingly subjected to the same cultural criticism
that is routinely applied to books, films and television programmes, their
developers are coming under pressure to change the way they portray women.
This, obviously, angers many of those who define themselves as “gamers” and
who feel threatened by the idea of such interference…. Games are growing up, whether gamers like it or not, and
testosterone-riddled male-power fantasies are bound to fall out of favour as
a result. The nerds are going to have to grow up and learn to live with the
invasion.

In other words, she’s admitting that those awful angry young men are absolutely correct. But speaking as a game designer who knows a fair percentage of the top game developers, these assertions are downright risible. I was at the offices of an extremely successful new game developer not too terribly long ago, and I would estimate around three percent of their employees were women. And in two days of discussions concerning what they were working on and what they were planning to develop in the future, there was absolutely zero mention of what might be of interest to women or female gamers. It’s just not their market, and therefore it is of no interest or concern to them.

My own game now in development, FIRST SWORD, came under some criticism from the likes of Manboobz and other petty SJWs a few months ago because I made it clear there will be no female fantasy gladiators. Historically speaking, female gladiators were the light comic relief between the real action; they were often set against midgets, for example. These complaints had no more effect on my design decisions than complaints about prostitutes had on Rockstar or complaints about scanty armor on female characters have had on every game company everywhere. But it is more than a little ironic to see that there are pinkshirts who will actually complain about the fact that I am refusing to design female slavery, in which women would be literally bought and sold as property, into a game.

The fact that there is now a large Lite Games industry in which women are the vast majority of the consumers doesn’t change what continues to appeal and sell to young men. You don’t need to tell me about the difference. After all, I designed Hot Dish for THQ, one of the more successful “casual games” played predominantly by women before Zynga rode the Facebook platform to going public. Some of the other options I came up with were a Wedding Dress game, a Bridal Party game, and a sorority-based game. I was literally years ahead of today’s pinkshirts.

But these casual girl games have as little to do with the current AAA shooters as the shooters do with the turn-based wargames that preceded them. Girl games are just another gaming genre, that’s all, and they will have as little effect on the design and development of games in other genres as has always been the case in the past. Now certainly, if someone comes up with a good mechanic in one of them that is useful in another genre, it will be copied and used. After all, Candy Crush Saga is simply a dumbed-down version of Steve Fawkner’s Puzzle Quest, thus allowing one to trace its design lineage all the way back to a turn-based wargame, Warlords, a CGW game-of-the-year which has probably been played by fewer women over the last 25 years than read this blog. But Call of Duty hasn’t changed how designers or players approach Advanced Squad Leader, and Depression Quest won’t change how they approach Call of Duty either.

The reason that the game industry is much less susceptible to the sort of pressure that Sarkeesian and Quinn are attempting to appeal is that whereas it is easy to write and publish books, it is much harder to design and develop games. And the sort of men who design and develop games are considerably less inclined to pay any attention to whatever it is that the pinkshirts are demanding today than the sort of men who used to write science fiction.

I find it all rather amusing. If the pinkshirts are already complaining about the lack of women in a fantasy gladiator game still in development, it should be downright hilarious to see their response to RIDING THE RED HORSE when it comes out in November.

But since we’re speaking of inclusiveness, this is as good a place as any to note that the Spanish (La Gravedad Mata) and Portuguese (Gravidade Mortal) versions of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills are free today on Amazon. As is the immortal John C. Wright’s Awake in the Night.

UPDATE: Lest you doubt it, academic feminists are quite literally attempting to destroy the game industry in much the same way they have destroyed science fiction and fantasy:

Adrienne: Why do we see such tension between academics and game designers?  less of an issue with indies, but there are always some people in industry that have similar questions until industrial logic takes over later and how can we better intervene in industrial logics to disturb that process.  How can academics bridge the gap to the industry audience to help them do different work?  How can we disrupt the capitalist norms that facilitate this?

Deirdra: This is a hard, personal issue.  Getting attacked or having friends getting attacked hurts.  It’s hard not to feel personally attacked and to get to an academic spot where you take the personal out of it.

Andrew: Feels quite viscerally injured when someone like Samantha Allen is lost to the industry because the reaction to her by some gamers was so violent that it didn’t make sense to stay. Academia needs to push for more radical positions within the industry to help make things better.

If they think the reaction was violent already, they haven’t seen anything yet now that we actually know what they are up to. It is time for the game industry to declare war on academia.

Your album covers totally lied

And so did your porn. It turns out lesbians aren’t hot. Not even a little bit. They’re just fat.

The US government has spent nearly $3 million on a study to explore lesbian obesity. According to the Department of Health and Human Services 69 per cent of American adults over the age of 20 are classified as overweight or obese and yet 75 per cent of America’s lesbian population falls into this category compared to half of the female population.

It’s hilarious to see the shambling lesbian land whales react to the obvious conclusion:

“Lets be absolutely clear. Lesbians are not gay because they can’t get a man.
All of the lesbians I know, and I know quite a few, have had to fight off
the attentions of men frequently. Studies like this only serve to give
ammunition to this type of prejudice.”

Sure, Pete Rose, whatever you say.

Old Age: Boomers suffer most

I am morally opposed to euthanasia, but sometimes, the bloody Baby Boomers really make it a terribly tempting proposition. Now they have discovered that they are the first generation in human history to grow old:

Every generation gets old, but for those who were told we’d be forever young, it just seems more painful. “It’s a huge issue,” says Dr. Anna Fels, a psychiatrist in New York. “I see so many who are trying to adjust their lives to this new phase, which for some reason none of us really pictured ourselves going through.”

Why didn’t we? We knew that eventually more people around us would be younger rather than older. But it still rankles. The image of a room filled with younger people is the perfect symbol.

“It’s an important marker for this generation because it reminds them that they are now the ones closest to obsolescence, the ones the world can do without,” says Dr. Roger Gould, a psychiatrist and the author of “Transformations,” a book about age-related adult problems.

Yes, the world can certainly do without them. In fact, the world would have been a good deal better off without their generational peculiarities. A fair amount of the blood that will be shed by our children and our grandchildren is going to be on their hands. They never pictured themselves going through what EVERY PREVIOUS HUMAN GENERATION HAD for the obvious reason that they are, collectively speaking, idiots.

The pathetic thing is that they are STILL trying to be cool. “When I was asked in a sociology class what music I listened to, I
hesitantly named Sam Cooke, thinking I would be stared at with stumped
pity. In fact, many voices shouted out, “Love Sam Cooke!””

Sure they did. I’m sure vast quantities of college students in 2014 listen to an now-obscure soul singer who died 50 years ago. Why, it’s amazing, but even the younger generations think you’re the epitome of a hep cat with a bad hip, Granddaddy-O! These narcissistic buffoons can’t even grow old and die with any grace. They’ll be sitting in hospital beds drooling on themselves, hooked up to machines, and if you lean in, put your ear up to their lips, and listen closely, you’ll be able to hear them whisper important words of the life-affirming wisdom they have acquired over the course of their long lives: “Eighty is the new twenty! Hospices are totally happening places these days!”

A female dev on the Quinn debacle

Gabriela Knight points out that the actual bias in the petty game development scene is very different than the anti-female one highlighted by the SJWs who have infiltrated the independent games media and are trying to save the near-nonexistent career of alleged indie games whore Zoe Quinn (or, apparently, Chelsea van Valkenburg):

 I’m a female indie dev. I’ve done art on about half a dozen games, one
of which was moderately successful. I’ve had varying degrees of
interaction with the journalists and developers involved in the latest
controversy du jour, as well as many others who are part of this culture
in ways that have not been publicized but are far more insidious than
Zoe Quinn sleeping with people for publicity. I was raised religious and
hold fairly conservative views politically (I feel I should declare my
biases ahead of time). This is as much personal detail as I am willing
to share. I wish I had the kind of courage to speak openly about this as
a few others have dared to, but I simply don’t…

Despite (or rather because of) all of the pontificating by left-leaning social justice types in the game industry about oppression, the easiest way for talentless hacks to break into the indie gaming industry is to associate with the sort of hipster liberal types that are getting all the publicity for their oppression. And worse yet, they get in over people with actual skills. I had a friend in college who was an amazing 3d modeler trying to break into the industry. She was turned down repeatedly and had to settle at a shitty mobile game company making cow clickers that no one cared about. Meanwhile Zoe Quinn is able to get hired by Loveshack solely because of who she knows (and sleeps with). But this isn’t about Zoe, her scandal is just a microcosm of the widespread corruption and nepotism in this industry. Another example is when the IGF allowed Fez to re-enter the competition (even though it had been there before) just because of Phil Fish’s connections to the festival organizers. These are not isolated incidents, and one need only look at the unprofessional interactions between journalists and devs on social media, at cons, and elsewhere to see that any semblance of professional barriers between these people don’t exist. It’s already apparent from their interactions that they form a very strong clique.

To be part of this scene while holding the religious and political views that I do is very difficult. I generally keep it close to my chest because the few times I’ve said even simple things like “I can’t make it to the thing on Sunday because I’m going to church” had led to all sorts of derision and mockery by other people in the industry. I shudder to imagine the blowback from their clique if I told them about how I voted yes on Prop 8. Just look at the way Doug TenNapel’s Kickstarter was lambasted by people in the industry (led by Ben Kuchera) because he dared to have a (non-liberal) political opinion. The creator of Earthworm Jim was only barely able to reach his Kickstarter goal, which was relatively modest compared to most of the others I’ve seen. This is just one example of how only those who toe the social justice line are allowed by the press and the devs’ clique. Even those who just try to keep quiet and uninvolved are often called out for not doing enough, or being a poor “ally.” To succeed in this industry you have to meet the standards of this clique, when it should be about meeting the standards of gamers. But when it’s impossible to get any publicity or work without meeting the standards of these self-fellating sycophants, that’s near impossible.

Women And Gaming

Let’s be completely honest: most women don’t play Quake III. Most of those few women like me who actually like first person shooters, grand strategy, space sims, and all those other genres that make up “core” gaming don’t care if they can play as a female protagonist, or if the girls are wearing skimpy outfits, or if you have to rescue the princess. They like the exact same things as men who like those games, and they just want good games, nothing more nothing less. And most of them feel that all this rambling on about representation is distracting from the real issue: big developers and publishers are making shitty games for mass appeal instead of the kind of awesome games we played growing up. When you distract from that to rant about what is literally imaginary misogyny you’re hurting women like me who just want good games.

Notice that it’s all the same lunacy that we’ve seen in the SFWA, only not quite as out of control because there are more barriers to entry. Quinn-van Valkenberg tends to remind one of a female John Scalzi, albeit with less talent for self-promotion. Game development is hard work and requires some logical thinking as well; it’s not just a simple case of scribbling a few short stories, sending them to a female friend who will publish them in some barely qualifying market, then calling yoursef a writer and spending the next twenty years going to cons, talking about books you’re never going to write, and relentlessly trying to push the industry leftward. The SJW problem in gaming and their tedious, decades-long crusade for More Women tends to revolve around the journalists because that’s the one area where absolutely no talent or mastery of the subject is required anymore.

I thought this comment from an interview with her ex-boyfriend was more than a little amusing:

“*IF* (that’s strong emphasis) Zoe came out and confessed about all of her wrongdoings, what do you think would happen and do you think things would change?”
See: Hugo Schwyzer.

The Rageaholic points out that the real problem isn’t that Zoe Quinn is an ambitious whore, she is merely a symptom of corruption in game journalism. The real problem is that such whoring is, apparently, a genuine career path in independent gaming, and, presumably, videogame journalism. As he correctly declares: “The term ‘videogame journalism’ is a misnomer.”

Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy

Despite having been involved with the game industry in various ways since 1992, I’ve never given a damn about Gawker media and its Kotaku site. It mostly strikes me as a sort of Gamers Lite site, more dedicated to pageviews than games, and full of the sort of “gamers” who wouldn’t know the difference between War at Sea and World in Flames. And while in some ways they are properly representative of the new breed of meaningless repetitive game with nothing but cartoon graphics that I, for one, can’t bother playing, it’s simply not the sort of site that I have ever bothered reading. I’m more interested in the latest VASSAL mod.

As for Zoe Quinn, she’s the same sort of no-talent nobody that has been getting serially promoted for simultaneously possessing a vagina while feigning an interest in games for as long as I can remember. I’m old enough that I can remember one of the early girl game pioneers, Brenda Laurel, putting her hand on my leg and expressing an inordinate amount of interest in whatever I was saying back when CGDC was still at the Santa Clara Westin, the only thing that is different now is that a) Laurel had genuine talent and b) the Johnny Wilsons and Chris Lombardis and Mike Wekslers and Terry Colemans of the gaming media had integrity.

However, with the exception of Computer Gaming World and my original game review column, (the second nationally syndicated game review column, I should note), gaming journalism has always been more or less corrupt. Even its better magazines, such as Game Informer, began as marketing vehicles. Unlike most game reviewers, I never accepted anything except games for review from anyone, certainly not sexual favors, and I never gave any game a favorable review that didn’t fully merit it. That’s why I was the only game developer permitted to do reviews in CGW.

However, Quinn and her foolish supporters are going to learn, as Nixon did, that the coverup is worse than the crime. Not that I would have been inclined to take her seriously anyhow, but whatever credibility she had with those less experienced than I am will be shot by now. Certainly Gamer Headlines seems unimpressed.

Speculation turned to accusation yesterday, when Zoe’s ex-boyfriend make a post on his own blog, accusing her (with proof) of cheating with a number of prominent industry figures. Among them was current Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, apparently solicitating sexual favours for positive press.

Pretty simple, right? The developer in question loses credibility, along with the gaming publication that allowed such a massive breach of professionalism occur. Except the rabbit hole has been going further than that. Not only has she been swapping blow for positive press, but also leveraging her sexual connections to stamp out anybody critical of her, most notably the organisers of ‘Women’s Game Jam’, who accuse the indie developer of encouraging a press blackout on the charity Jam to promote her own similar event.

Seriously, who are these nobodies? Some guy whose one game sold 200k copies and a woman who begs for money to make videos complaining about games are supposedly figures of note?

The cult of Dicky Dawk

Richard Dawkins is moving into some very strange territory:

My man in the pub was at the very low end of what believers will do and pay for: the Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak.

When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts.

But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’

The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended.

At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits.

What a pity for him that “Scientology” is already taken. You know, I’d have a private breakfast or lunch with people for a mere $25,000. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’d have private lunches or dinners. Since I prefer a silent breakfast, accompanied by reading rather than talking, you’re just not going to get your money’s worth.

As it happens, membership in the Dread Ilk is free and BYOG. Which, of course, stands for Bring Your Own Gun. Not that there isn’t a rigorous test, which consists of old-timers such as Nate and the Ghost of Bane staring you and your weapon of choice down with narrowed eyes. If they grunt and turn away, you’re in. If they spit and shake their heads, you’re out. Of course, if you show up with anything in 9mm and you’re not a lady, there is a good chance that if you are accepted, you’ll be sent to the Queer Party Friends brigade. Show up with a Glock and you may as well wear heels.

The most amusing part of the piece is definitely the comments, as the Dicky Dawk cultists show up in force. I’m sure you’ll be very surprised to know that the author, an atheist, is repeatedly assumed to be, and accused of being, a Christian. Because, after all, there can be no criticism of the Great Master that is not rooted an irrational and unscientific attachment to the evilist of all evil religions. They repeat by rote the usual Dawkinsian nonsense such as this:

Why would xenophobia, racism, rape or sexual infidelity be any more wrong if God did exist? You cant get an ought from an is, even if the “is” is devine. If an act is “moral” only because God commands it, then performing that act isn’t morality, merely blind craven obedience to a divine dictator – who, if the Old Testament is to be believed, frequently ordered his worshippers to commit genocide, rape and child abuse.

Morality: “conformity to the rules of right conduct”. So performing the act that God commands, which is conforming to the rules of conduct declared to be right by the Creator, is, without question morality. Whether the conformity is “blind craven obedience” or brave, self-determined voluntary compliance, the act is moral.

Which also means that xenophobia, racism, rape or sexual infidelity can only be wrong IF the intrinsically legitimate superhuman authority a) exists, and b) has set rules of right conduct that those things specifically violate.

Psychoanalysis and a surprise endorsement

The strange thing about these weird little fen is that they proudly proclaim how different and unusual they are, then turn around and assume that everyone else must share their priorities and values. Their psychological issues are often apparent in the way they contradict themselves, not just over time, but often in the course of the same statement. Our Friend Damien is now theorizing, on the basis of his own extensive experience with psychological issues, that I’m on the verge of a mental breakdown… because I didn’t win a trophy? Which is particularly funny in light of McRapey’s recent multi-platform meltdown.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Well, if I’m any judge of mental breakdowns, Theodore Beale’s borderline personality disorder will be revving towards implosion around now.

Geoffrey D. Wessel
Fuck him anyhow.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
@damiengwalter You sure about that? Because he seems to think this is all a good thing from the most recent tweet.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
 If I’m any judge, yes 😉

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
That is fascinating.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
Especially given the results in the vote breakdown document. Western Union couldn’t have been clearer.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Also highlights how deluded he is. He genuinely believes he has thousands of “Ilk”, when it’s just a few dozen +

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
+ bozos and berks who log on to his blog day after day to argue to rant about stuff they hate.

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
I peeked at his website. He’s going with a badge of honor strategy to interpret the results.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Of course. The real burn comes in a few weeks when we’ve all stopped talking about him.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
Wait, who?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
What? Did you say something?

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
He’s deep in his echo chamber right now. Once the adoration wears off he’ll write something utterly assholish.

Apparently the real burn has been postponed, as they’re still not done talking about the worthy winners of the Hugo Award. Oh, wait, no, they’re still talking about me.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Theo’s been absolutely and publicly humiliated by the community his pathology has fixated on. I genuinely hope he finds a good therapist.

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
I find this very doubtful. The whole narrative revolves around persecution & oppression, he publicly predicted he’d lose

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet 10h
Meh, people like him have a remarkable skill at constructing narratives in which they come out on top no matter what happens.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Most likely he’ll ball up in bitter rage that will cripple the rest of his pitiful life. No change there then!

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
I wonder if, perhaps, unilaterally, people paid him neither mind nor money? Then what?

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
Plenty of ppl already don’t. That’s why the escalation

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Give it a few weeks, the attention he needs will dissipate, and we’ll find out.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Eventually people get bored of the story.

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
Vox didn’t get “purged” bc he suddenly decided to start being a racist. He’d been a racist for years

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
He got “purged” bc for the 1st time he directed a racist screed at a specific person, & marked it to go on Twitter

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Yes, I know all that. 🙂 But ironically, it’s all this that got him the mass attention to begin with.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
That’s why borderlines are very difficult. They fixate on a group and will do anything to get attention from it.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
And his gang of halfwits will start losing interest now because he’s been shown to be weak.

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Well, either that, or the conspiracy moanings will ramp up. Either way, fuck him.

john_zeleznik ‏@john_zeleznik
 Regretfully this plays into he and his goons narrative.

john_zeleznik ‏@john_zeleznik
A nitwit like Beale that has a ridiculous monicker like Vox Day is too ignorant to be humiliated.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
That’s what malformed personalities do, they create new identities in an attempt to belong somewhere.

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Self-fulfillig prophecies often do.

Isn’t it clever and witty when they pretend not to know who they are going on and on about? The remarkable thing about their bizarre attempts to psychoanalyze me is that all of this is the result of a single tweeted link. That’s how desperate for attention I was: I wrote a single blog post in response to a Vibrant American who was publicly lying about me, then tweeted the link. If that’s not attention-whoring, well, what is?

Spacebunny’s response to all this cracked me up: Have to leave @voxday alone for a couple of hours – better lock up the guns before I leave.

But I couldn’t be too down, as John Scalzi was, despite our many differences, gracious enough to review “Opera Vita Aeterna”. He was really too kind, writing: “It was like Gene Wolfe… easy to enjoy… deserving of award consideration.” I mean, wow! I can honestly say I never expected my writing to be compared to Gene Wolfe’s in any way, shape, or form. And by a Hugo Award winner, no less! It’s very heartening.

Anyhow, now that I have been shown to be less than massively popular among a small community of physically decrepit freaks weak, I will completely understand if you begin losing interest now.

Would-be Salon writer visits Alpha Game

It started with a seemingly innocent series of five emails, which I distilled down to part of one:

Can you give me a quick, couple-paragraph summary of the overall AG philosophy? I think that a large part of it is that it’s about not being/appearing weak. What exactly is weakness? Is kindness weakness? Is gentleness weakness? Or is it more that reticence and insecurity in your decisions and beliefs are weaknesses?

I addressed it. Two days later, I addressed another one:

Basically, “how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you?” Even though I had made it very clear that I was not interested, he had assumed that I still was. He did the right thing, I guess. He didn’t give up when I turned him down. But it was pretty revolting, rather than attractive.

I reached some conclusions and promptly lost interest:

Anyhow, the point is that outside of sex, women aren’t very interested in men and their interests and men have even less interest in women and theirs. It is a simple and straightforward observation, there is nothing wrong with this perfectly normal state of affairs, and the better you understand it, the more easily you will get along with the opposite sex. 

But then the man about whom she was writing sent me an email. Which is when hilarity ensued.

I’m the guy from the story. For what it’s worth, I read through both the post and the extensive comments section. I was absolutely shocked to find this post, since Eliza never mentioned to me that she intended to make this story public…. seems like some of the people posting had some misconceptions about me and how I acted — and after reading Eliza’s piece, I can hardly blame them!

She reacted angrily by outing the gentleman by linking to his social media accounts and managed to out herself in the process. It turns out that the ever-so-curious Eliza is a writer named Eliza Hecht who was doing research for what one presumes will be another hit piece on the Androsphere.