FrothySolutions
There's no gym for my squandered youth.
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- #201
It's still Year of the (Earth) Pig for now.
This is why you have to live now, while you have a life.
"Founding Father" or "Milk & Cigarettes 12: Nuttin' for Christmas"
TL;DR: I fall out of love with video games, and by extension all of my copes, so I withdraw from all my communities and become a Hermit. As the world enters an age of heated sociopolitical discourse that I mostly miss out on.
I would've posted this earlier, but I wanted to make sure you guys didn't spoil The Rise of Skywalker for me. And then holiday shit came up... it's been busy. 'Tis the night of 
Christmas Eve 
and right now I'm at my parents house. The usual gathering from last Thanksgiving is here, I think I've got a good amount of free time to write now. Not a creature is stirring. In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon will be here. I've got a whole pack of extra chunky Chips Ahoy and a canister of Muscle Milk Pro. I'm on a bulk. Compensating for having lost a lot of weight over the summer & fall.
What's on my list this year? Well, ever since I lost my copes I haven't really wanted any "things" for Christmas. If I was a teenager it'd probably be video game stuff. And as an adult I would just buy it myself. But now there's nothing. Well, maybe something. One thing I wanted to do (and did) recently was save all my Yahoo! Groups stuff. I mentioned in "The Merits of Being Emo, Part 2: Savior of the Broken" that Yahoo! Groups was going away on December 14th. So I've been busy archiving all of that stuff. too. Not just photos and files, but screenshots and usernames and post dates, archiving everything as it was before it went away. Thousands of screenshots. TENS of thousands of photos & files. This, I guess, makes up for all of the picture/source hunting I wanted to do years back. But am I happy that I did it? Well, first off, I didn't get everything. I couldn't. Because some of the old Groups that I was a member of had shut down long before. If anyone was a member of "Slimydick's Fan Club," please get in contact with me. Second, now that I have all that I have, it's like, so what? This is how I've been feeling a lot recently. I'll see someone's avatar and be like "What's that from?" And then they tell me. And then I don't care anymore. I don't know why, maybe pictures/sources don't seem as rare/hard to find as they used to be? And why should I care what some random DeviantArtist draws? There's a million DeviantArtists, am I supposed to want to know them all?
Speaking of porn, over on incels.is Mainländer and I had a little talk about him and his lolicon manga. It reminded me a lot of how I used to talk to that one guy on GameFAQs.
What Mainländer wants is loli stuff written by actual men, I'm guessing because the only people who can make good hetero lolicon are people who actually like hetero lolicon. Heterosexual dudes who are actually attracted to lolis. And I agree. But my frustration is that this should be obvious. I don't know what business he has looking at lolicon created by women. I don't know what business it has existing at all. But it exists, and he reads it. Despite calling for a better class of lolicon. And he can like what he wants, it's just I'm confused and enraged by the idea of loli porn made by women. Because you should only make what you like. If I draw a bunch of fetish art, it's probably because fetish art is my fetish. It would be weird if it wasn't, right? You wouldn't be crazy to think that was weird, would you? Maybe even bad. People who don't have a passion for something shouldn't apply their hand to it. Porn made by people just looking to capitalize on perverts shouldn't be supported. Only porn made by the people who like the content they make. So, these female lolicon mangakas, they do like the work they make, right? But what could they possibly like about stories where adult men get with small girls? Is this the kind of porn they like? Because there's a difference between porn that appeals to men and porn that appeals to women. Yes, there's even a difference between porn that appeals to straight men and porn that appeals to gay women. Quality porn is made to appeal to its creator and the people who are like their creator. That's why auteur yuri is filled with page after page of plain looking lesbians standing dramatically in the snow together or some such boring bullshit. But of course it's not that simple, otherwise I wouldn't be so vexed by it. We have Kodomo no Jikan, one of Mainländer's (and the guy from GameFAQs) favorites. Created by a woman. But the premise is that an adult man must deal with the frequent sexual temptations from 3 small children. On paper it sounds like a dude would have to have made this. From the concept, what sexual appeal could a woman, gay or straight, derive from this? Maybe if the main character was an adult woman then we'd be talkin' but this isn't that! But maybe it's like what Mainländer (and the guy from GameFAQs) says: Kodomo no Jikan is not lolicon. It just happens to be a story about a man attracted to three little girls, and also it's filled with fanservice. To which I say, as I've said more times than I care to recall, HOW IS THAT NOT LOLICON??? God DAMN IT!!! To say this isn't lolicon undermines so much that we do call "lolicon." And takes that designation away from people who want to enjoy it. But then, if it is lolicon, how do I explain the fact that a woman who you wouldn't think would be into this kinda stuff made it?
It all ties back to the hangups that cost me my copes in the first place. And the "A woman made it/approved of it so it's not porn/objectifying" defense for video games and TV shows and stuff. An issue that didn't come up that much in the days of furry porn on Yahoo! Groups. Because you couldn't hold furry men and women to normal sexual expectations. Everyone was degenerate. But it did come up in 2013. Picture this...
Here you are, a literal 40 year old virgin. Are you bothered? No. What's bothering you is The Wonderful 101. What's bothering you is Wonder Pink's depiction in it, and all of the microskirts and pantyshots. All this, from a Nintendo exclusive. Now, you cannot stress this enough: You LIKE microskirts and pantyshots. But what you don't like is Nintendo and PlatinumGames trying to downplay it. Sweep it aside. Distract us from it by retweeting pictures of kids playing it, as if to say "This is a game for kids, if you took anything as 'fanservice' or 'sexual' from this game, you're wrong." And that's why you're harassing Hideki Kamiya on Twitter right now. You've seen quite a few lewds in your time. Obviously more than Kamiya, or anyone else at Platinum, or anyone at Nintendo. if they think there's nothing wrong with The Wonderful 101. Microskirts and pantyshots, especially of this pervasiveness, equals lewd. And if they're arguing that it doesn't, then that means so many other things you enjoy are also not lewd. People give you shit for this. "You sound like Anita Sarkeesian!" It's 2013, so to complain about "male gaze" and "the male fantasy" is still seen as radical nonsense by consumers and journalists alike. But they don't understand. At this point probably only you and MovieBob understand. Probably for the same reasons. If you like ecchi, technically you agree with Sarkeesian. You agree with the "social justice warriors." And you need them to be right. Fanservice lovers and fanservice haters can agree: If something is porn, call it porn. Stop trying to convince people it's something your mom could play, or your kids could play. In doing this you take porn from the people who like it, and foist it on the people who hate it.
There's a lot of this going on. Speaking of franchises with an actiony veneer to distract from the tiddy and microskirts, have you seen what this Studio Trigger has been coming up with lately? But no, they say. You're not supposed to enjoy it sexually. It's a "parody!" You've explained how that excuse doesn't work, but they're tired of hearing you repeat yourself. Japan just announced they're gonna host the 2020 Olympics. And if you see anything in the opening ceremony, or closing ceremony, or any between-event NBC soft culture pieces about the anime of the now, you swear to the Lord God your savior you're kickin' somebody's ass. JP Kellams of Platinum insists people have an unfair bias against Japanese things when it comes to this. You do not. Game of Thrones has also been getting away with this and you're just as rustled. It used to be you weren't that alone in critiques that Thrones was just "glorified porn." But ever since that Red Wedding, no one will hear ill of it. Especially your own family. They love Thrones. "Plenty of shows and movies have nudity and sex scenes" they protest. And yes, you're not saying every nude depiction of the human form is porn. But Thrones crosses the line between "tasteful nudity" and "the kind of thing specific to porn." Where is that line? You'll be honest, you know it when you see it. But what your family's problem is, like a lot of people, is that they don't care to argue where the line is. Because they're distracted by all of the non-porn qualities of the show. It's "necessary to the story" they say. To show just how gritty and serious everything is. No it is not "necessary." Their best argument is that it "serves" the story. Case in point, the movie "Hounddog." In which a 12 year old Dakota Fanning performs in a rape scene. Controversial. Especially for 2007. But it pales in comparison to what Thrones is doing. And why? Because there's only so much you can do with a child actress before it becomes reprehensible, if not illegal. But also? The movie didn't "need" it. The moment and the movie are still as shocking as they need to be, even though we don't get to see Christoph Sanders pound her from behind. And if Hounddog doesn't need it, Thrones doesn't need it. Thrones just happens to "use" it, maybe. And that doesn't absolve a thing from being "glorified porn." It doesn't mean the porn content isn't there, it just means, at best, you can enjoy it from another perspective.
You will die on this hill and be proud to do it: We don't categorize things as "porn" for their lack of literary value. Or lack of irony. Or lack of confident female characters. Or lack of a combo system. We categorize things as "porn" for the presence of sexual content.
In Incel History: The r/incels subreddit was created. But at the time, it was just as dead as r/incel, the one no one remembers.
In Soy History: We lost principled Pope of the cloth, Benedict XVI. Last traditional Pope. His replacement was Pope Francis, a Pope for a modern age in every sense of the word. First Pope with the pontificial name "Francis." First Pope from the Americas. And the first Pope who was like "Fuck all the rules that make Catholicism Catholicism, I guess." Francis is a kind man, but he isn't much for discipline against vice. And with him as Pope, the world had precedent to ease up on certain things. After all, if the Pope doesn't judge, why should we? Also, Steven Universe debuted. "This shit'll never work" I thought like a fool. "A Great Value version of Adventure Time, riding its coattails." I was also still trying to make something happen with Adventure Time fandom. 6 years and a GLAAD Award later, I see that if anything, Steven Universe influenced Adventure Time. Marceline & Princess Bubblegum? "Save it for the fanfics" we said. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not necessary. But to Steven Universe, people said "No! Necessary!" Maybe not right away though? It took a few episodes to get to the good stuff. Maybe it had more to do with the times. Maybe the times we lived in weren't gay enough yet.
This comic might disagree though. Up through 2012, the term "social justice warrior" was a compliment. But in 2013, it was seen as an insult, even by the people who used to use it as a compliment.
2012 brought us "Gangnam Style." 2013 brought us "What Does the Fox Say?" I think that illustrates how the "Early YouTube" era was over at that point. We're entering the "Millennial Humor" era. Irony is a primary ingredient here. Songs like Gangnam Style and The Fox sound nice, but they either aren't that lyrically deep, or most of the audience doesn't understand the lyrics, whatever they might be about. So part of the joke is the hype surrounding songs like this and the crazy amount of views they rack up. The memes of old weren't funny anymore, it was funnier to laugh at them. Troll Face was no longer funny. Rage Comics were no longer funny. It was funnier now to counter-signal them on r/coaxedintoasnafu. And the leetspeak and randcomecore of the mid-2000s was put to death with "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m." Similarly, "Doge" and "Dogespeak" became a meme, because not how you're supposed to talk. Shrek became a meme because haha imagine liking Shrek that much. I would even attribute the resurgence in hyper-exaggerated animation channels on YouTube to this. I don't know that it JUST started in 2013, after all MLG videos were around before 2013 and those are pretty ironic. And hyper-exaggerated animations was a Newgrounds thing before it was a YouTube thing. But it was definitely around this time a shift occurred." This time I think was like a bridge between Internet humor types. Joji Miller was probably that bridge. We went from the "Funny but not ironically funny" sketch comedy that Smosh and nigahiga did in their time, to Joji's sketch comedy which was technically sketch comedy, but with that ironic twist. The other ingredient, I think, was the rise of the short-form Internet video. Vines. Which has social media and the mobile device to thank for its spread. Vine (and shortly afterward Instagram) put it to people to make something funny in only a few seconds. That was the primary means of sharing video on the big social media platforms for the young people.
Young people. Not "all" people. Facebook was still in the lead there.
Facebook was still "desktop friendly" I guess you could call it. Vines, these are targeted directly at people with phones & mobile devices who do both their filming and their socializing on these devices. And while Facebook wasn't really as closely associated with mobile devices as Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter, it and the rest of the Internet was changing to the whims of the mobile device. Know why Google is so popular now? Why Chrome is so popular? Why GMail is so popular? Because there are no frills. No big banners and stuff. Which sounds obvious now, but once upon a time Yahoo! was the big name. Because we preferred what Yahoo! offered. Big flashy portals that offered us a smorgasbord of content. Bright, garish web mail with news updates and stuff. Mobile devices don't wanna do that. They don't have the battery or the screen resolution or the data. They want sleek, simple, unencumbered. Like Google. But culture as we know it today hadn't ENTIRELY gotten started by 2013. There are some things that had yet to happen. For instance, in 2013 we still hated Pewdiepie. Or around 2013. I'm not exactly sure of the exact date, but my proof is that he was part of an E3 around this time. He did his facemcam-in-camera Let's Play streamer thing as part of a game's presentation. I wanna say it was Killzone? But maybe I'm thinking of his piece at VGX where he played Dying Light. But it was definitely around this time. He was hated like Logan Paul circa 2017. 2017, not 2018. Not necessarily cruel or irresponsible, but an annoying dumbass. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, making our kids stupid, etc. Like most popular YouTube channels. But because of the whole "irony" thing, it was funny to like him enough to reference him in MLG videos and stuff.
With the end of CW4Kids and the start of Vortexx, I didn't have much to do as far as animoo save for the usual stuff: Try to keep track of where all my shows were moving, and if I couldn't watch it on TV find a torrent. And if I couldn't find a torrent, check Watch Cartoon Online. Also, save pictures you find in the ads on Watch Cartoon Online. Not much to talk about there. 2013 was mostly focused on...
[Gaming]
I didn't know it or think to look into it, but my cable & Internet provider offered me an e-mail address. As in, not one with Hotmail or Yahoo! or Gmail. One under their domain. Which meant I could join a forum I had been thinking about joining for a while now: NeoGAF. I think their policy has since changed, but originally NeoGAF was a comparatively exclusive forum to join. You couldn't sign up with any old Hotmail account, you had to have a unique one. To prevent people from sidestepping bans, I'm guessing. Alamo Drafthouse of video game forums, NeoGAF purported itself to live up to a higher standard of gaming forum. Why? I dunno if anyone remembers this as NeoGAF's reputation isn't the same as it used to be, but NeoGAF was known as the forum that the industry names used. So they're like "Industry people respect our forum enough to join it and talk to our members, so you're gonna take your shoes off when you come in here." If you've been reading these ramblings, you know that industry people are who I wanted to rub elbows with. So I made it official and joined. Making a point to really pimp those video game ideas I had. Remember how I wanted to make video games? My avatar was a logo for the "studio" I wanted to have. But I didn't quite take to NeoGAF like I took to GameFAQs. The Brawl boards and me hit it off immediately. NeoGAF? My threads would fall off the front page with no responses. And I was eventually relegated to posting in other people's threads, not making my own. I guess I didn't have the community clout yet. I don't know if it was because NeoGAF had a different userbase, or if times had changed for video game forums in general and I just hadn't caught up with them.
Speaking of times changing, I was probably too late for joining NeoGAF to matter anyway. Because the industry names I wanted to talk to were much easier to reach on "social media" now. That's where people interacted with celebrities and stuff. When Vine first dropped, know what the main feature about it on the news was? That established its legitimacy as an important thing? Will Sasso was on it.
vine.co
Will Sasso having a Vine account in 2013 is like Will Smith having a YouTube account in 2018. A big deal, but also soon to set precedent for the norm. At first it's a big deal that celebrities are on the Internet, but then it becomes "Well yeah, Vine/YouTube/Twitter is huge, they should be on it." It was on Twitter that I pressed Kamiya. It was from Twitter that I got Kellams' opinions about Japan. The days of very special "Fight Nights" were long passed now. And I used to wonder why. Why all these important celebrities, who I thought had to be too busy with important celebrity stuff to waste time with trivial Internet distractions, were now wasting time with trivial Internet distractions. Simple answer: The Internet has gotten much bigger, and now that's where most people are. There's actually a resource where you can, allegedly, see how many people use the Internet in the whole world.
Celebrities on the Internet was a big deal in 2003-2006. Let's look at World Internet Usage back then.
Little over a billion people on the Internet back in July 2006. But go back up to that "Most Popular Social Networks" video. By 2013 Facebook alone beats those numbers. Facebook ALONE has more users than there were people on the Internet PERIOD in 2006. Not only had Internet usage gone up, but the "penetration," the percentage of each country's population with Internet usage, has gone up. In 2006, 227,303,680 North Americans used the Internet. That's 68.6% of all North Americans. Today not only has the total number gone up, but the percentage has shot up. Why? It comes back again to the mobile device. People talk about "smartphone addiction" today and the toxicity of social media, that's because the Internet and the "life highlights" of the Instagram influencer are accessible at all times from your phone, just about anywhere. Back when it was just computers, it just wasn't that practical. You were as mobile as a laptop allowed you to be. If you had a laptop. If you had a desktop, you couldn't be on the Internet constantly, so only the nerds were on the Internet constantly. The ones with lots of free time, but either no desire or option to spend it with humans in person. The ones who were able to surpass the comparatively high accessibility barrier. But then phones became more powerful, more affordable. You could just be on the Internet whenever you wanted. But as the Internet becomes more and more for everyone, it gets changed. Changed by the people on it, and changed by the potential it has to reach an audience.
Also in 2013, Edward Snowden happened. And it kicked off a new era of privacy scares. Fear of big corporations, big government, big data, etc. Especially in the online games I played. The idea of using a proxy or a VPN, back in MY DAY this was for people trying to bypass bans. Only cheaters considered doing this. It was like hacking! And buying things with "bitcoin?" Insanity. But by 2013 NordVPN was advertising openly on YouTube, and there were a choice of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, including joke ones like "Dogecoin." The online gaming market was also starting to shift. Traditional MMORPGs used to be big. And in 2013 they were still pretty big, in fact you might argue they were very big. There were still fanservicey ads about saving the queen and whatever back then. Scarlet Blade, one such game, got me in 2013. And TF2 wasn't dead yet either. In fact, it was getting ready to enter partnership with Adult Swim. Things like MMOs and TF2 were still big, but other things, if they hadn't surpassed MMOs and TF2, were starting to rise. You might not know this about Valve, but its developers work on a "Work on what you want" basis. So if Valve has two games, and no one wants to work on one, it dies. That whole "life's blood" issue that killed HeroSmash. Today TF2 isn't as big as it used to be, and I believe things started to turn in 2013. This was the year DOTA 2 came out of beta. A game that Valve put deliberate effort into to making its flagship esport game. TF2 could've been that game, couldn't it? Could it not? I thought it could, but it was DOTA 2 at Gamescom, DOTA 2 at Dreamhack, not TF2. TF2 was still riding high, but I'm pretty sure that was from residuals. MOBAs were fast becoming the hot new thing. People used to talk about the downfall of TF2 stemming from it becoming free to play, but today we know it's because Valve had too many boats in the water than it could keep from sinking.
Speaking of diminishing returns, Nintendo. And the Wii U. And how at E3 they didn't even bother with a real conference. And how at E3 Geoff Keighley grilled Reggie about how the best Nintendo had for their "incredible Nintendo surprise" was Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, and it wouldn't even be out for the holiday season. Some say this is them admitting defeat. That Nintendo has never really been a competitor against Sony or Microsoft, or at least Nintendo was never playing the same game. Nintendo didn't bring the hardware strength or the 3rd party support. And people might like Nintendo despite that, but that just means Nintendo is playing a different "game." They're not trying to win "Most Powerful Console" at E3. They're trying to win the hearts of Mario fans, and people who already like the Nintendo brand. People like me. But, thanks to my hangups, my love was fading fast. Maybe a new Smash game would reignite the fire I felt back in 2007? I was excited for Smash. But... I found myself on the GameFAQs Smash Bros. 4 boards and I just didn't feel that Brawl Era magic. In fact, those of us who were often sat around reminiscing/complaining about how much better/crazier the Brawl Era was. We were probably right though, at least as far as the GameFAQs scene was concerned. Brawl Era was probably peak GameFAQs, if not peak Smash Bros, period. Going by the Poll of the Day metric.
Sometimes GameFAQs re-releases old polls. So you can compare responses from past times. This poll was released in 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018. But look at how many people voted in each.
The latter 2000s, specifically 2008, was the peak. The Brawl Era. And we see as the years wane on, the numbers get smaller and smaller. Because in 2013, and today, the people who would ordinarily be on GameFAQs have spread out and moved on to other sites. Like the r/smashbros subreddit. How big was r/smashbros in 2008?
Functionally nonexistent. But how about in 2013? According to Redditmetrics, it broke 20k subscribed Redditors by late 2013.
And as the number of Poll of the Day participants on GameFAQs steadily declines, the day soon approaches when Reddit surpasses GameFAQs as the more visited Smash Bros hype station. In 2013 GameFAQs has 39,072 Poll of the Day participants. By spring the next year r/smashbros will have beaten those numbers. Inversely, back in 2008 the people who would be on other sites, if they existed, were on GameFAQs. Even in a time when the Smashboards were a thing, GameFAQs was Smash Central. Video Games Central. Smashboards was important as a dedicated Smash resource, but it was more like the sports guy or weatherman to the overall news program that was the Internet video game community, and GameFAQs was the head anchor. Back in 2007-2008, Smashboards was good if you wanted serious study on tiers, for instance. GameFAQs was for everything else. All of the fun stuff. Back in 2007-2008. Not as much in 2013. But I wasn't UNexcited. I kept riding the hype train. Even though I had opposed the idea of an extra handheld version of Smash since 2011. My point about it being lesser stood, by the way. As clumsy as it was to have two Smash games, it was just as clumsy for GameFAQs to have two Smash Bros 4 boards. One for the 3DS, and one for the Wii U. And I wasn't the only one who hated the idea of splitting the community. So like so many Pokémon games before it, people picked a "main" game and a "main" board. Which did they pick? The Wii U one. Because like I said, the handheld version is lesser. An unnecessary cash grab for a thing that needed no further meddling. The live-action Disney remake of its day.
Maybe I could've used this time to get back into Mortal Kombat? Netherrealm Studios had consummated their marriage to WB Games with Injustice: Gods Among Us. Starting an era where Mortal Kombat would be closely associated with DC. In ways more favorably remembered than MK vs. DC Universe. It's official now. I remember the combat looking really good. It was nice to watch, but I just wasn't motivated enough to play it. I was starting to mostly enjoying watching games, instead of playing games. It would've been nice to have the Nintendo Channel right about this time, but it was shut down in 2013, along with a bunch of other Wii stuff, because it was Wii U time. But 2013 was still a good time for Let's Plays and stuff. As well as something I was only just then discovering, video game prank calls. Like the kind ICEnJam makes.
It was less of an ambition and more of an idle fantasy to do this though. I couldn't just play sounds into a phone, the quality wouldn't be good. I needed a rig where I could play game audio files directly over a line. Like I hear them in the videos. But I didn't know how to do that. And that was my justification for not trying. 2013 saw the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I think maybe the most iconic Animal Crossing title to date, because of the introduction of Isabelle. I never heard people talk about Animal Crossing like they did until New Leaf. But according to reports and interviews by Iwata, the point of Animal Crossing was to "broaden the appeal." Everybody wants to "broaden the appeal." Iwata was particularly proud of how young female audiences took to New Leaf and the 3DS as a whole. Why young females? Because Nintendo didn't have very many of those? Allegedly that's true, they didn't, but the real reason this was an important win for Iwata was because he thought girls were the ones always on them damn phones. He was afraid women wouldn't be interested in the 3DS, because of the ever dominant presence of the mobile device.
animalcrossingworld.com
I didn't play Animal Crossing: New Leaf. So that stuff about it appealing to women must be true, because I'm not a woman. But the war against mobile was on for Nintendo. People had been goading them, "Just go mobile." It made no sense, between the 3DS and the Vita it was clear who was winning. If anyone should go mobile it's Sony. But the taunts remained the same for Nintendo: Go third party. You can't compete with mobile third party. Put your games on PC while you're at it.
Speaking of the war on mobile, this Tweet from 2013 said that by 2014, there would be more mobile devices on the Internet than PCs. So the mobile takeover was showing no signs of slowing down.
Maybe this is why Reddit overtook GameFAQs in 2014? The mobile takeover continued to influence gaming and the Internet and everything else. Picture this...
2014. "Sins of the Father" stirs your heart as you re-listen to the Metal Gear Solid V trailer from last year's E3. After 6 years it's time once again for a main line Metal Gear Solid game. Just as MGS4 came out with Brawl, MGSV will come out with Smash 4. Part of it will, anyway. You're going to be teased with Ground Zeroes, but later you'll get Phantom Pain. And it's making people think: How much are you actually supposed to pay to play one level of a game, really? But you're not worried about that now. You're hyped for a new main MGS game! Why? Because recently you saw this video.
And that video led to another "This Is How You Don't Play" video, and then another, and you learned about a guy named DarksydePhil. A guy so fun to hate, that you wanna actually be there in the stream when he plays MGSV. You wanna be there with the rest of the hatedom, laughing at his misery, there to see the soon-to-be clipped moments as the unfold. Look at him suffer! He thinks the game is bad because he can't manage the controls. Well YOU managed to complete the Metal Gear Solid games, so DarksydePhil is just being a baby. And so you've earned the right to laugh at his whining. Kojima Nation!
It's just... Quiet. You don't wanna sound like a Kojima hater or nothin', but her depiction. Frankly if Kojima hadn't said anything, you probably wouldn't have minded. You get to go on a beach date with Paz in her underwear in Peace Walker and you were able to stifle that. You can convince yourself that Quiet's design maybe isn't exclusively what you'd see in ecchi or something But then it came out that Kojima specified to the character designer that Quiet's design should be "erotic." If he just hadn't said that, any conclusions we drew would've been our fault. But whatever Quiet looks like, the INTENTION itself that he SPECIFIED was "Make it erotic." That's what the design is supposed to be. So he backtracks. "Oh no, mah Eengleesh she's-a no so good, Imma no mean the word 'erotic,' yes?" Clarifying that he meant he wanted to design Quiet so that women would want to cosplay as her. Which didn't help his case. If he doesn't mean "erotic," how does he in his limited English come to that word if what he meant was "Convince women to cosplay as her?" What DID he mean? Bearing in mind that he has absolutely seen women cosplaying as characters from his games. He knows what cosplay is about. So he backtracks again with the famous Tweet, "Once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds." And because Kojima is a genius, apparently, all was forgiven. You are not entirely satisfied with that answer. But this is still "You don't wanna sound like Anita Sarkeesian" days. And you really wanna enjoy hating on DSP. So you have faith that the explanation will pay off. It just better not be something stupid like "She's a solar panel and she needs to be exposed to the sun to do magic." That might've been fine if Kojima said "Design her so that her skin is exposed." But he said "erotic." And that implies a specific thing that's neither here nor there with regard to being a magic solar panel.
What has the Internet video game playing community become, anyway? It feels like the game has changed, and DSP might be the last Let's Player of his kind that you watch. It used to be that Let's Players played every console and/or PC game that was released. Now it seems people would rather play esoteric indie games you've never heard of. And you don't just mean "Papers, Please" or "The Stanley Parable." You mean games like QWOP and Happy Wheels and Flappy Bird. The last game you saw traditionally Let's Played is Super Mario 3D World. Now it seems, despite games being released, today's Let's Player doesn't bother unless it's super AAA. Big news. Like MGSV. As Geoff Keighley predicted, people were mostly shrugging at Tropical Freeze. Before the turn of the decade, you're pretty sure they would not have shrugged at Tropical Freeze. You suspect it's because Let's Players are trying to diversify, so they don't blend in with "the pile." Stand out. Play games you're not gonna see get played on other channels. Unless that game is really demanded by the audience. Like Tropical Freeze isn't. Voice over gameplay isn't enough anymore. You gotta have a facecam. And you gotta have multiple revenue streams. You're not sure when it happened. You feel like it has something to do with this Patreon thing that's been making news. It's like Kickstarter except you keep paying forever??? Cable is, what, $75 a month? For several channels. Many of which you actually watch. For you to pay a YouTuber's Patreon, you would need to be getting to same value. You're essentially paying for the one channel, a channel that's technically not on all the time. How much should one channel cost? For "TV" that is often only a few minutes long? We laugh at DSP for being money hungry like this, but so many of these up and coming Let's Players are doing it too. It's too bad. You have no interest in being Tobuscus or Markiplier. But that's the face of the Let's Player nowadays. If only you had actually gotten started when you should've.
You might also remember 2014 as the year Elliot Rodger committed his atrocity. And sometimes you might hear people ask "Why didn't he just try Tinder? It's so easy!"
And the answer comes back "Tinder didn't exist back then." Even though technically yes it did, it just it wasn't balls deep into the zeitgeist like it is today. Nor was Rodger himself, or incel culture. r/incels was still essentially dead. But by 2014 things were getting started. "Swipe right" had officially entered the lexicon, as well as "Uber" and "Lyft" and lots of other phone appy words. All for the presence of the almighty mobile device. And Rodger himself had earned a spot on various "Most Disturbing Killers" YouTube listicles. For a while, the most reputation that incels will have is some sort of very small Dark Webbish sect. A very very niche thing. But the ball was rolling. Talk about it a little more later.
[Gaming]
To be painfully honest, my 2014 was consumed by one thing: How I spent my E3, and the ensuing weeks/months after that talking about the stuff at E3. My conscience was already busy with MGSV and Quiet, but then came Nintendo in 2014. There was Palutena and her, let's say "gazey" reveal trailer for Smash Bros, there was Devil's Third being a Wii U exclusive, Bayonetta 2, of course, any one of these games would've been bad enough to get the "it's not meant to be sexual you're misinterpreting it" gaslight. But these were ALL featured in the same Nintendo Treehouse event. Considered worthy of sharing the stage with the "family friendly" Nintendo brand. And it wasn't just me that found that weird. I can't find it, and refuse to go look for it, but during the Bayonetta 2 gameplay demonstration the Platinum Games rep remarked how they had designed some Nintendo-themed outfits for the game, and one of them was a Princess Peach dress, and Platinum was all like "Y'know this is Nintendo and all, do you want us to maybe tone down the sexuality in the costumes?" And Nintendo was like "No, don't do that." And Platinum thought that was weird and surprising. That Nintendo of all companies would allow this. See, it's not just me that finds this weird. But Nintendo insists that there's nothing remarkable about it or any of their E3 2014 showing. It really bothered me. And by this time I had some experience as a NeoGAF poster. So after the id of E3 wore off and the time for measured reflection came, I made a thread raising the touchy subject of "fanservice" in video games. And it was a touchy subject. I can't find it, and refuse to go look for it, but there was a thread on NeoGAF that was dedicated to laughing at "creepy" sexualized content in games. Dead or Alive here, sexy MMORPG ads there. Then somebody brought up Bayonetta and the thread devolved into angry chaos. And someone brought up a point that really rung true to me: People give Bayonetta a pass because her games are good. It's easy to complain about how creepy Xtreme Beach Volleyball is because it's also not a good or fun game franchise. And so cognitive dissonance kicks in. Bayonetta can't be the male fantasy. Even though the game ends with an exhibitionist dance video that serves no purpose other than to give the player something to enjoy sexually. A woman designed her! And the gameplay is technically flawless! So it can't count.
This was basically the defense I was given in the thread I made on NeoGAF. But because it was NeoGAF, it wasn't just players. It was journalists, it was staff at developer studios and localization companies who had a lot to say about how wrong I was about PS Vita lewdware, the industry names I had longed to reach out and touch. People complain about how games are soy and have bent to the SJW whim, but in 2014, in this NeoGAF thread, it was very much not that time yet. "Look past the sexual aspects" they said. "Me and my wife love this game" they said. I couldn't help but feel like maybe I wasn't reaching them. So I kept at the thread. I thought about it on the way to work, and on the way home from work. I couldn't visit NeoGAF at work, it was filtered, but I still wrote notes about what I wanted to say in the thread. "I'm just not explaining myself properly. They should know where I'm coming from. Because they have problems with other games. The sexy MMORPG ads. If they're saying the games at Nintendo Treehouse didn't count, then the sexy MMORPG ads don't count! Therefore if they see a problem with the sexy MMORPG ads, they should be able to see similar in these Nintendo Treehouse games." The thread dragged on, for weeks. And then it just dried up. And to be honest, I was thankful. I came to realize, there was no winning it. And I just wanted to be done. Or at least take some more time to form my arguments. What weren't they getting??? Or maybe I don't get it. If there's one thing I can't stand against, it's the word of the creators/people who own the rights. Platinum says I'm wrong about Bayonetta. Nothing gratuitous or titillating about that dance. And so I just have to accept that. Like I did with other games and shows before. Accept it and move on to something else. It's just, 2014 gave me a lot more than usual to accept and move on from. I can accept and move on from Bayonetta. But I've also got a bone to pick with Nintendo. And Wonderful 101. And Devil's Third. And Kid Icarus. And Fire Emblem. And maybe even a little bit of Hyrule Warriors. And if through all of this Nintendo swears to me that I'm wrong and that there's nothing but family friendliness in their brand? 2014 is too much. Yes, a Smash game is on the way. But you'll never forget 2014's lineup. Every time I boot up my Wii U would mean seeing Bayonetta in WaraWara Plaza because that's a Nintendo title they wanna lead with. I can't deal with that level of bullshit. I can't deal with Nintendo wanting to be Mario on the streets but Bayonetta in the sheets. Can't be both. So... looking at Nintendo and seeing nothing but hypocrisy now, I decided I was done with Nintendo. But it wasn't just Nintendo I was done with. What I needed was a company that would stand up for the values I needed to be represented. That would call a spade a spade, that would call porn when they saw it. But the truth is, the rest of the game industry doesn't really care like I care. I'm not saying Microsoft is on that stage giving us close-ups of Cortana's ass, but whatever modesty they might practice in their games, it's not out of any mission to not be the next Bayonetta. At best, they just don't care. At worst, they'd love to be Bayonetta, she earned a perfect 10 and what few people are buying her games seem to find her so empowering. Because I guess getting naked at the player's command is fine if you're the main character? And it was the hypocritical journalists too. Who have so much to say about how Dead or Alive & Ninja Gaiden are creepy but Bayonetta is not. All are fighting games that have beautiful women in them, it's just one happens to be really really good as far as combo-based fighting gameplay is concerned. And as journalists they should be able to acknowledge both. By all means, don't disregard the gameplay. But if you hate tiddy and booty in your video games, call it out even when it's painful. Like Arthur Gies did.
www.polygon.com
For his honesty he was marginalized in the industry, and made a laughingstock by the audience. An opinion that haunted him for years later, if it doesn't still haunt him. It's not just Nintendo, it's not just the game companies, it's the game industry as a whole. From the shit-eating grins in corporate management who have the most perfectly inoffensive words to say about their games, to the fucking hypocrite consumers who can't make up their minds over whether or not they want Samus to have heels. When I see Nekkid Teenage Ninja Food Fight, a game that shouldn't even have made it out of Japan, on the front page of GameTrailers, I know that the gaming world has gone very wrong for me. Where once I had the security that things like that would never happen, I have it no longer? And so I gave up video gaming itself as a cope. Gave my hardware and games to my nephew that very Christmas. No playing games, no making games, no dreams of being a Let's Player or a sprite Flash video maker or reviewer or article writer or whatever the hell. No following the news, no watching E3, and absolutely no NeoGAF. I tried to stick around on GameFAQs because Poll of the Day wasn't specifically related to video games, but over time even that started to drift away from me. I talked a lot about video games there, and without that to talk about I had nothing to post about, and therefore no reason to be on the forum. This was also a decisive blow in the "2D vs. 3D" battle. My love of hentai and ecchi and saving/sourcing pictures of it came into sudden question. The porn I'm enjoying, that doujin I'm saving and learning Japanese so I can understand it, is it one of those "Don't treat this like porn treat this like a serious work of art" pieces? Maybe it isn't. But you can never be too sure. One day you're engrossed in Tinkle Bell's "Rondo Duo," next thing you're reading reviews pleading "Please look past the pornographic aspects and enjoy it for whatever else is worth enjoying in this game." Like with video games, you're seeing too much of this going on nowadays. What you need is porn that acts as a deliberate counter signal to the "Treat this like art" porn. Porn that states emphatically "This is porn, do not mistake this for anything else. If you're here for non-porn reasons, you're in the wrong place." But like in the games industry, nobody really cares that much. But [Weebshit] is more than the lewds you save. It's the Saturday morning cartoons you watch. How about those? Is that cope still there? Not by the end of 2014. That new programming block Vortexx didn't last long. The block, and its website, just ground to an abrupt absence. And I was staying far away from Adult Swim's Toonami. I used to be able to watch Digimon Fusion, but that moved to premium cable. This left Saturday mornings on Cartoon Network as my only option. Which was a death slot as it was. I had seen so many shows last one season or half a season and then just be replaced with reruns of Teen Titans Go! The only reliable programming I had was Pokémon, and because it was a Nintendo product I wasn't exactly in love with the partnership. But maybe I don't have to watch cartoons. Was there anything at all to get into? Not on actual TV their wasn't, not yet. And Netflix wouldn't have anything until 2016. I was too early for the "Cord Cutting Renaissance" when all of the quality TV moved to streaming services. It was either Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad.
No video games. No 2D. Not even anything to watch on TV. The most basic, most universal of copes. I could not even watch TV. I had no Internet community to shitpost to, and nothing to shitpost about. And my job? Suddenly my job started to suck a lot more. Nothing changed about my job, just my outlook changed. I didn't have the copes. It was okay that my job sucked because I was gonna do some kind of video game thing with my life. Or make friends with lewd artists and confab with the lewd community or something. I lost that. And without that now I have to ask myself "So what ARE you gonna do with your life? You're 41 going on 42, is this where you should be? If you're not gonna be in some kind of game thing?" I hadn't gotten a raise in all the years I had been there. I was starting to get anxious. I started looking into things like "How long should I work somewhere before I get a raise/promoted?" I figure it'd been 6-7 years here, I should be due some kind of change. Then I read these articles.
6 years is way too long, according to Workopolis and their "millions of resumes." I dunno, I've never used Workopolis, but over 80% of them stay at one job no longer than 4 years. And reading that, I pondered how I would either negotiate a raise/promotion, or get a new job. I tried the former. My manager was adamant, there was nothing for me. He says I'm a freelance/contract hire. So I can't be "promoted" per se. It was the first I had heard of it, I didn't know I was a freelancer. So I started looking for other jobs. But... I couldn't find anything that pays as much as my current job. That will definitely hire me. 2014 was arguably my darkest era.
It was also a dark era for the world. Or at least things were starting to darken. I had cloistered myself from the world, so I wasn't really aware, but a lot of sociopolitical events were taking place that would define the Internet and all of the people on it for years to come. 2014 saw the birth of ISIS. The "Smash Bros. 4" of jihadist terrorism. We were riding high off the death of Bin Laden, we had done it, al-Qaeda was no more and the Middle East was about to become the new Russia. In that we were gonna put McDonalds' everywhere and bring our American capitalist bikini car washes to their culture. But no, none of those things happened. Speaking of Russia and how the Cold War was supposed to be an 80s thing, Vladimir Putin was making himself an international villain again. Sure he'd assassinated a few dissidents, that's not news. What WAS news was how he annexed Crimea. Taking physical territory. Actual global domination moves. Being ignored by intergovernmental organizations used to be a thing we associated with, like, North Korea. Not any of those "civilized" European countries. There's no way anything like that could happen in Europe today. Trayvon Martin had been shot in 2013, and that was bad enough. But 2014 saw the deaths-by-cop of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown. This gave rise to the Ferguson riots, but also Black Lives Matter. The Fappening had repercussions for laws and platform policies about "involuntary porn." Which I always thought was an overreach. Because The Fappening was pictures that were stolen. But because it was so widespread (what were all of those women doing taking nudes anyway, I never took no nudes is that just a really common thing or what), websites started being like "No one can post ANY pictures without express written consent from the subject." And how are you even gonna prove that? You can't. But if you're on Reddit like "He's some pictures I took of my ex-girlfriend" the assumption is she doesn't know they're being posted. But... she consented to having them taken. And before The Fappening you used to be able to do whatever you wanted with someone pictures that you got fair and square. The Fappening was not about pictures that the leakers got fair and square so it shouldn't be used as an example for policy on pictures that were taken fair and square. Speaking of involuntary porn, 2014 saw the beginning of the end for Bill Cosby, by the hand of Hannibal Buress. Doing the Ronan Farrow thing before Ronan Farrow. And? There was Gamergate. A lot of important stuff happened in 2014, but I think Gamergate was really what gave rise to the "Acronym SJWs vs. Alt-White /Pol/ack" narrative that dominates the Internet today. Maybe Gamergate just happened at the time time, maybe it had more to do with it being 2014 and social media giving more voice to the rabble than ever. But this was before r/The_Donald, this was before "Can't Stump The Trump," before the Ellen Pao controversies, it was Gamergate where names like Milo Yiannopoulos gained their notoriety. Which was really something because when I last checked, that "argle bargle male fantasy" culture war that Gamergate was predicated on was nonsense when I was saying it. When Anita Sarkeesian was the main voice associated with it. But just as I hang up my hat, the idea of games needing to appeal more to whammin takes off so much that there's vocal rebuttal to it. Didn't happen when I was doing it. If you were mad about boobs or butts you were pretty quickly shut up. Then along comes Zoe Quinn and suddenly people wanna have less boobs and butts in their video games. I missed it by that much. I really could've used Gamergate.
But i was in hermitage. When, if ever, would I wake up? Maybe I wake up in 2015 or 2016. Talk about that in a bit. As long as I'm at my parents' house I have time to type.
Christmas Eve and right now I'm at my parents house. The usual gathering from last Thanksgiving is here, I think I've got a good amount of free time to write now. Not a creature is stirring. In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon will be here. I've got a whole pack of extra chunky Chips Ahoy and a canister of Muscle Milk Pro. I'm on a bulk. Compensating for having lost a lot of weight over the summer & fall.What's on my list this year? Well, ever since I lost my copes I haven't really wanted any "things" for Christmas. If I was a teenager it'd probably be video game stuff. And as an adult I would just buy it myself. But now there's nothing. Well, maybe something. One thing I wanted to do (and did) recently was save all my Yahoo! Groups stuff. I mentioned in "The Merits of Being Emo, Part 2: Savior of the Broken" that Yahoo! Groups was going away on December 14th. So I've been busy archiving all of that stuff. too. Not just photos and files, but screenshots and usernames and post dates, archiving everything as it was before it went away. Thousands of screenshots. TENS of thousands of photos & files. This, I guess, makes up for all of the picture/source hunting I wanted to do years back. But am I happy that I did it? Well, first off, I didn't get everything. I couldn't. Because some of the old Groups that I was a member of had shut down long before. If anyone was a member of "Slimydick's Fan Club," please get in contact with me. Second, now that I have all that I have, it's like, so what? This is how I've been feeling a lot recently. I'll see someone's avatar and be like "What's that from?" And then they tell me. And then I don't care anymore. I don't know why, maybe pictures/sources don't seem as rare/hard to find as they used to be? And why should I care what some random DeviantArtist draws? There's a million DeviantArtists, am I supposed to want to know them all?
Speaking of porn, over on incels.is Mainländer and I had a little talk about him and his lolicon manga. It reminded me a lot of how I used to talk to that one guy on GameFAQs.
https://incels.is/threads/we-need-a...nce-seinen-manga-written-by-a-man-tbh.164736/
What Mainländer wants is loli stuff written by actual men, I'm guessing because the only people who can make good hetero lolicon are people who actually like hetero lolicon. Heterosexual dudes who are actually attracted to lolis. And I agree. But my frustration is that this should be obvious. I don't know what business he has looking at lolicon created by women. I don't know what business it has existing at all. But it exists, and he reads it. Despite calling for a better class of lolicon. And he can like what he wants, it's just I'm confused and enraged by the idea of loli porn made by women. Because you should only make what you like. If I draw a bunch of fetish art, it's probably because fetish art is my fetish. It would be weird if it wasn't, right? You wouldn't be crazy to think that was weird, would you? Maybe even bad. People who don't have a passion for something shouldn't apply their hand to it. Porn made by people just looking to capitalize on perverts shouldn't be supported. Only porn made by the people who like the content they make. So, these female lolicon mangakas, they do like the work they make, right? But what could they possibly like about stories where adult men get with small girls? Is this the kind of porn they like? Because there's a difference between porn that appeals to men and porn that appeals to women. Yes, there's even a difference between porn that appeals to straight men and porn that appeals to gay women. Quality porn is made to appeal to its creator and the people who are like their creator. That's why auteur yuri is filled with page after page of plain looking lesbians standing dramatically in the snow together or some such boring bullshit. But of course it's not that simple, otherwise I wouldn't be so vexed by it. We have Kodomo no Jikan, one of Mainländer's (and the guy from GameFAQs) favorites. Created by a woman. But the premise is that an adult man must deal with the frequent sexual temptations from 3 small children. On paper it sounds like a dude would have to have made this. From the concept, what sexual appeal could a woman, gay or straight, derive from this? Maybe if the main character was an adult woman then we'd be talkin' but this isn't that! But maybe it's like what Mainländer (and the guy from GameFAQs) says: Kodomo no Jikan is not lolicon. It just happens to be a story about a man attracted to three little girls, and also it's filled with fanservice. To which I say, as I've said more times than I care to recall, HOW IS THAT NOT LOLICON??? God DAMN IT!!! To say this isn't lolicon undermines so much that we do call "lolicon." And takes that designation away from people who want to enjoy it. But then, if it is lolicon, how do I explain the fact that a woman who you wouldn't think would be into this kinda stuff made it?
It all ties back to the hangups that cost me my copes in the first place. And the "A woman made it/approved of it so it's not porn/objectifying" defense for video games and TV shows and stuff. An issue that didn't come up that much in the days of furry porn on Yahoo! Groups. Because you couldn't hold furry men and women to normal sexual expectations. Everyone was degenerate. But it did come up in 2013. Picture this...
Here you are, a literal 40 year old virgin. Are you bothered? No. What's bothering you is The Wonderful 101. What's bothering you is Wonder Pink's depiction in it, and all of the microskirts and pantyshots. All this, from a Nintendo exclusive. Now, you cannot stress this enough: You LIKE microskirts and pantyshots. But what you don't like is Nintendo and PlatinumGames trying to downplay it. Sweep it aside. Distract us from it by retweeting pictures of kids playing it, as if to say "This is a game for kids, if you took anything as 'fanservice' or 'sexual' from this game, you're wrong." And that's why you're harassing Hideki Kamiya on Twitter right now. You've seen quite a few lewds in your time. Obviously more than Kamiya, or anyone else at Platinum, or anyone at Nintendo. if they think there's nothing wrong with The Wonderful 101. Microskirts and pantyshots, especially of this pervasiveness, equals lewd. And if they're arguing that it doesn't, then that means so many other things you enjoy are also not lewd. People give you shit for this. "You sound like Anita Sarkeesian!" It's 2013, so to complain about "male gaze" and "the male fantasy" is still seen as radical nonsense by consumers and journalists alike. But they don't understand. At this point probably only you and MovieBob understand. Probably for the same reasons. If you like ecchi, technically you agree with Sarkeesian. You agree with the "social justice warriors." And you need them to be right. Fanservice lovers and fanservice haters can agree: If something is porn, call it porn. Stop trying to convince people it's something your mom could play, or your kids could play. In doing this you take porn from the people who like it, and foist it on the people who hate it.
There's a lot of this going on. Speaking of franchises with an actiony veneer to distract from the tiddy and microskirts, have you seen what this Studio Trigger has been coming up with lately? But no, they say. You're not supposed to enjoy it sexually. It's a "parody!" You've explained how that excuse doesn't work, but they're tired of hearing you repeat yourself. Japan just announced they're gonna host the 2020 Olympics. And if you see anything in the opening ceremony, or closing ceremony, or any between-event NBC soft culture pieces about the anime of the now, you swear to the Lord God your savior you're kickin' somebody's ass. JP Kellams of Platinum insists people have an unfair bias against Japanese things when it comes to this. You do not. Game of Thrones has also been getting away with this and you're just as rustled. It used to be you weren't that alone in critiques that Thrones was just "glorified porn." But ever since that Red Wedding, no one will hear ill of it. Especially your own family. They love Thrones. "Plenty of shows and movies have nudity and sex scenes" they protest. And yes, you're not saying every nude depiction of the human form is porn. But Thrones crosses the line between "tasteful nudity" and "the kind of thing specific to porn." Where is that line? You'll be honest, you know it when you see it. But what your family's problem is, like a lot of people, is that they don't care to argue where the line is. Because they're distracted by all of the non-porn qualities of the show. It's "necessary to the story" they say. To show just how gritty and serious everything is. No it is not "necessary." Their best argument is that it "serves" the story. Case in point, the movie "Hounddog." In which a 12 year old Dakota Fanning performs in a rape scene. Controversial. Especially for 2007. But it pales in comparison to what Thrones is doing. And why? Because there's only so much you can do with a child actress before it becomes reprehensible, if not illegal. But also? The movie didn't "need" it. The moment and the movie are still as shocking as they need to be, even though we don't get to see Christoph Sanders pound her from behind. And if Hounddog doesn't need it, Thrones doesn't need it. Thrones just happens to "use" it, maybe. And that doesn't absolve a thing from being "glorified porn." It doesn't mean the porn content isn't there, it just means, at best, you can enjoy it from another perspective.
You will die on this hill and be proud to do it: We don't categorize things as "porn" for their lack of literary value. Or lack of irony. Or lack of confident female characters. Or lack of a combo system. We categorize things as "porn" for the presence of sexual content.
In Incel History: The r/incels subreddit was created. But at the time, it was just as dead as r/incel, the one no one remembers.
In Soy History: We lost principled Pope of the cloth, Benedict XVI. Last traditional Pope. His replacement was Pope Francis, a Pope for a modern age in every sense of the word. First Pope with the pontificial name "Francis." First Pope from the Americas. And the first Pope who was like "Fuck all the rules that make Catholicism Catholicism, I guess." Francis is a kind man, but he isn't much for discipline against vice. And with him as Pope, the world had precedent to ease up on certain things. After all, if the Pope doesn't judge, why should we? Also, Steven Universe debuted. "This shit'll never work" I thought like a fool. "A Great Value version of Adventure Time, riding its coattails." I was also still trying to make something happen with Adventure Time fandom. 6 years and a GLAAD Award later, I see that if anything, Steven Universe influenced Adventure Time. Marceline & Princess Bubblegum? "Save it for the fanfics" we said. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not necessary. But to Steven Universe, people said "No! Necessary!" Maybe not right away though? It took a few episodes to get to the good stuff. Maybe it had more to do with the times. Maybe the times we lived in weren't gay enough yet.
This comic might disagree though. Up through 2012, the term "social justice warrior" was a compliment. But in 2013, it was seen as an insult, even by the people who used to use it as a compliment.
2012 brought us "Gangnam Style." 2013 brought us "What Does the Fox Say?" I think that illustrates how the "Early YouTube" era was over at that point. We're entering the "Millennial Humor" era. Irony is a primary ingredient here. Songs like Gangnam Style and The Fox sound nice, but they either aren't that lyrically deep, or most of the audience doesn't understand the lyrics, whatever they might be about. So part of the joke is the hype surrounding songs like this and the crazy amount of views they rack up. The memes of old weren't funny anymore, it was funnier to laugh at them. Troll Face was no longer funny. Rage Comics were no longer funny. It was funnier now to counter-signal them on r/coaxedintoasnafu. And the leetspeak and randcomecore of the mid-2000s was put to death with "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m." Similarly, "Doge" and "Dogespeak" became a meme, because not how you're supposed to talk. Shrek became a meme because haha imagine liking Shrek that much. I would even attribute the resurgence in hyper-exaggerated animation channels on YouTube to this. I don't know that it JUST started in 2013, after all MLG videos were around before 2013 and those are pretty ironic. And hyper-exaggerated animations was a Newgrounds thing before it was a YouTube thing. But it was definitely around this time a shift occurred." This time I think was like a bridge between Internet humor types. Joji Miller was probably that bridge. We went from the "Funny but not ironically funny" sketch comedy that Smosh and nigahiga did in their time, to Joji's sketch comedy which was technically sketch comedy, but with that ironic twist. The other ingredient, I think, was the rise of the short-form Internet video. Vines. Which has social media and the mobile device to thank for its spread. Vine (and shortly afterward Instagram) put it to people to make something funny in only a few seconds. That was the primary means of sharing video on the big social media platforms for the young people.
Young people. Not "all" people. Facebook was still in the lead there.
Facebook was still "desktop friendly" I guess you could call it. Vines, these are targeted directly at people with phones & mobile devices who do both their filming and their socializing on these devices. And while Facebook wasn't really as closely associated with mobile devices as Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter, it and the rest of the Internet was changing to the whims of the mobile device. Know why Google is so popular now? Why Chrome is so popular? Why GMail is so popular? Because there are no frills. No big banners and stuff. Which sounds obvious now, but once upon a time Yahoo! was the big name. Because we preferred what Yahoo! offered. Big flashy portals that offered us a smorgasbord of content. Bright, garish web mail with news updates and stuff. Mobile devices don't wanna do that. They don't have the battery or the screen resolution or the data. They want sleek, simple, unencumbered. Like Google. But culture as we know it today hadn't ENTIRELY gotten started by 2013. There are some things that had yet to happen. For instance, in 2013 we still hated Pewdiepie. Or around 2013. I'm not exactly sure of the exact date, but my proof is that he was part of an E3 around this time. He did his facemcam-in-camera Let's Play streamer thing as part of a game's presentation. I wanna say it was Killzone? But maybe I'm thinking of his piece at VGX where he played Dying Light. But it was definitely around this time. He was hated like Logan Paul circa 2017. 2017, not 2018. Not necessarily cruel or irresponsible, but an annoying dumbass. Appealing to the lowest common denominator, making our kids stupid, etc. Like most popular YouTube channels. But because of the whole "irony" thing, it was funny to like him enough to reference him in MLG videos and stuff.
With the end of CW4Kids and the start of Vortexx, I didn't have much to do as far as animoo save for the usual stuff: Try to keep track of where all my shows were moving, and if I couldn't watch it on TV find a torrent. And if I couldn't find a torrent, check Watch Cartoon Online. Also, save pictures you find in the ads on Watch Cartoon Online. Not much to talk about there. 2013 was mostly focused on...
[Gaming]
I didn't know it or think to look into it, but my cable & Internet provider offered me an e-mail address. As in, not one with Hotmail or Yahoo! or Gmail. One under their domain. Which meant I could join a forum I had been thinking about joining for a while now: NeoGAF. I think their policy has since changed, but originally NeoGAF was a comparatively exclusive forum to join. You couldn't sign up with any old Hotmail account, you had to have a unique one. To prevent people from sidestepping bans, I'm guessing. Alamo Drafthouse of video game forums, NeoGAF purported itself to live up to a higher standard of gaming forum. Why? I dunno if anyone remembers this as NeoGAF's reputation isn't the same as it used to be, but NeoGAF was known as the forum that the industry names used. So they're like "Industry people respect our forum enough to join it and talk to our members, so you're gonna take your shoes off when you come in here." If you've been reading these ramblings, you know that industry people are who I wanted to rub elbows with. So I made it official and joined. Making a point to really pimp those video game ideas I had. Remember how I wanted to make video games? My avatar was a logo for the "studio" I wanted to have. But I didn't quite take to NeoGAF like I took to GameFAQs. The Brawl boards and me hit it off immediately. NeoGAF? My threads would fall off the front page with no responses. And I was eventually relegated to posting in other people's threads, not making my own. I guess I didn't have the community clout yet. I don't know if it was because NeoGAF had a different userbase, or if times had changed for video game forums in general and I just hadn't caught up with them.
Speaking of times changing, I was probably too late for joining NeoGAF to matter anyway. Because the industry names I wanted to talk to were much easier to reach on "social media" now. That's where people interacted with celebrities and stuff. When Vine first dropped, know what the main feature about it on the news was? That established its legitimacy as an important thing? Will Sasso was on it.
Vine
The entertainment network where videos and personalities get really big, really fast. Download Vine to watch videos, remixes and trends before they blow up.
Will Sasso having a Vine account in 2013 is like Will Smith having a YouTube account in 2018. A big deal, but also soon to set precedent for the norm. At first it's a big deal that celebrities are on the Internet, but then it becomes "Well yeah, Vine/YouTube/Twitter is huge, they should be on it." It was on Twitter that I pressed Kamiya. It was from Twitter that I got Kellams' opinions about Japan. The days of very special "Fight Nights" were long passed now. And I used to wonder why. Why all these important celebrities, who I thought had to be too busy with important celebrity stuff to waste time with trivial Internet distractions, were now wasting time with trivial Internet distractions. Simple answer: The Internet has gotten much bigger, and now that's where most people are. There's actually a resource where you can, allegedly, see how many people use the Internet in the whole world.
World Internet Users Statistics and 2023 World Population Stats
Internet World Stats, Population and Internet Users in all countries and usage in all regions of the world. The Internet Big Picture.
www.internetworldstats.com
Celebrities on the Internet was a big deal in 2003-2006. Let's look at World Internet Usage back then.
Little over a billion people on the Internet back in July 2006. But go back up to that "Most Popular Social Networks" video. By 2013 Facebook alone beats those numbers. Facebook ALONE has more users than there were people on the Internet PERIOD in 2006. Not only had Internet usage gone up, but the "penetration," the percentage of each country's population with Internet usage, has gone up. In 2006, 227,303,680 North Americans used the Internet. That's 68.6% of all North Americans. Today not only has the total number gone up, but the percentage has shot up. Why? It comes back again to the mobile device. People talk about "smartphone addiction" today and the toxicity of social media, that's because the Internet and the "life highlights" of the Instagram influencer are accessible at all times from your phone, just about anywhere. Back when it was just computers, it just wasn't that practical. You were as mobile as a laptop allowed you to be. If you had a laptop. If you had a desktop, you couldn't be on the Internet constantly, so only the nerds were on the Internet constantly. The ones with lots of free time, but either no desire or option to spend it with humans in person. The ones who were able to surpass the comparatively high accessibility barrier. But then phones became more powerful, more affordable. You could just be on the Internet whenever you wanted. But as the Internet becomes more and more for everyone, it gets changed. Changed by the people on it, and changed by the potential it has to reach an audience.
Also in 2013, Edward Snowden happened. And it kicked off a new era of privacy scares. Fear of big corporations, big government, big data, etc. Especially in the online games I played. The idea of using a proxy or a VPN, back in MY DAY this was for people trying to bypass bans. Only cheaters considered doing this. It was like hacking! And buying things with "bitcoin?" Insanity. But by 2013 NordVPN was advertising openly on YouTube, and there were a choice of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, including joke ones like "Dogecoin." The online gaming market was also starting to shift. Traditional MMORPGs used to be big. And in 2013 they were still pretty big, in fact you might argue they were very big. There were still fanservicey ads about saving the queen and whatever back then. Scarlet Blade, one such game, got me in 2013. And TF2 wasn't dead yet either. In fact, it was getting ready to enter partnership with Adult Swim. Things like MMOs and TF2 were still big, but other things, if they hadn't surpassed MMOs and TF2, were starting to rise. You might not know this about Valve, but its developers work on a "Work on what you want" basis. So if Valve has two games, and no one wants to work on one, it dies. That whole "life's blood" issue that killed HeroSmash. Today TF2 isn't as big as it used to be, and I believe things started to turn in 2013. This was the year DOTA 2 came out of beta. A game that Valve put deliberate effort into to making its flagship esport game. TF2 could've been that game, couldn't it? Could it not? I thought it could, but it was DOTA 2 at Gamescom, DOTA 2 at Dreamhack, not TF2. TF2 was still riding high, but I'm pretty sure that was from residuals. MOBAs were fast becoming the hot new thing. People used to talk about the downfall of TF2 stemming from it becoming free to play, but today we know it's because Valve had too many boats in the water than it could keep from sinking.
Speaking of diminishing returns, Nintendo. And the Wii U. And how at E3 they didn't even bother with a real conference. And how at E3 Geoff Keighley grilled Reggie about how the best Nintendo had for their "incredible Nintendo surprise" was Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, and it wouldn't even be out for the holiday season. Some say this is them admitting defeat. That Nintendo has never really been a competitor against Sony or Microsoft, or at least Nintendo was never playing the same game. Nintendo didn't bring the hardware strength or the 3rd party support. And people might like Nintendo despite that, but that just means Nintendo is playing a different "game." They're not trying to win "Most Powerful Console" at E3. They're trying to win the hearts of Mario fans, and people who already like the Nintendo brand. People like me. But, thanks to my hangups, my love was fading fast. Maybe a new Smash game would reignite the fire I felt back in 2007? I was excited for Smash. But... I found myself on the GameFAQs Smash Bros. 4 boards and I just didn't feel that Brawl Era magic. In fact, those of us who were often sat around reminiscing/complaining about how much better/crazier the Brawl Era was. We were probably right though, at least as far as the GameFAQs scene was concerned. Brawl Era was probably peak GameFAQs, if not peak Smash Bros, period. Going by the Poll of the Day metric.
Poll of the Day - Do you look at the results of the Poll of the Day before you vote? - GameFAQs
Poll of the Day - Do you look at the results of the Poll of the Day before you vote? on GameFAQs
gamefaqs.gamespot.com
Sometimes GameFAQs re-releases old polls. So you can compare responses from past times. This poll was released in 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018. But look at how many people voted in each.
The latter 2000s, specifically 2008, was the peak. The Brawl Era. And we see as the years wane on, the numbers get smaller and smaller. Because in 2013, and today, the people who would ordinarily be on GameFAQs have spread out and moved on to other sites. Like the r/smashbros subreddit. How big was r/smashbros in 2008?
Functionally nonexistent. But how about in 2013? According to Redditmetrics, it broke 20k subscribed Redditors by late 2013.
/r/smashbros metrics (Super Smash Bros.)
r/smashbros metrics including subscriber growth, count history, and subreddit rank (Super Smash Bros.)
redditmetrics.com
And as the number of Poll of the Day participants on GameFAQs steadily declines, the day soon approaches when Reddit surpasses GameFAQs as the more visited Smash Bros hype station. In 2013 GameFAQs has 39,072 Poll of the Day participants. By spring the next year r/smashbros will have beaten those numbers. Inversely, back in 2008 the people who would be on other sites, if they existed, were on GameFAQs. Even in a time when the Smashboards were a thing, GameFAQs was Smash Central. Video Games Central. Smashboards was important as a dedicated Smash resource, but it was more like the sports guy or weatherman to the overall news program that was the Internet video game community, and GameFAQs was the head anchor. Back in 2007-2008, Smashboards was good if you wanted serious study on tiers, for instance. GameFAQs was for everything else. All of the fun stuff. Back in 2007-2008. Not as much in 2013. But I wasn't UNexcited. I kept riding the hype train. Even though I had opposed the idea of an extra handheld version of Smash since 2011. My point about it being lesser stood, by the way. As clumsy as it was to have two Smash games, it was just as clumsy for GameFAQs to have two Smash Bros 4 boards. One for the 3DS, and one for the Wii U. And I wasn't the only one who hated the idea of splitting the community. So like so many Pokémon games before it, people picked a "main" game and a "main" board. Which did they pick? The Wii U one. Because like I said, the handheld version is lesser. An unnecessary cash grab for a thing that needed no further meddling. The live-action Disney remake of its day.
Maybe I could've used this time to get back into Mortal Kombat? Netherrealm Studios had consummated their marriage to WB Games with Injustice: Gods Among Us. Starting an era where Mortal Kombat would be closely associated with DC. In ways more favorably remembered than MK vs. DC Universe. It's official now. I remember the combat looking really good. It was nice to watch, but I just wasn't motivated enough to play it. I was starting to mostly enjoying watching games, instead of playing games. It would've been nice to have the Nintendo Channel right about this time, but it was shut down in 2013, along with a bunch of other Wii stuff, because it was Wii U time. But 2013 was still a good time for Let's Plays and stuff. As well as something I was only just then discovering, video game prank calls. Like the kind ICEnJam makes.
It was less of an ambition and more of an idle fantasy to do this though. I couldn't just play sounds into a phone, the quality wouldn't be good. I needed a rig where I could play game audio files directly over a line. Like I hear them in the videos. But I didn't know how to do that. And that was my justification for not trying. 2013 saw the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I think maybe the most iconic Animal Crossing title to date, because of the introduction of Isabelle. I never heard people talk about Animal Crossing like they did until New Leaf. But according to reports and interviews by Iwata, the point of Animal Crossing was to "broaden the appeal." Everybody wants to "broaden the appeal." Iwata was particularly proud of how young female audiences took to New Leaf and the 3DS as a whole. Why young females? Because Nintendo didn't have very many of those? Allegedly that's true, they didn't, but the real reason this was an important win for Iwata was because he thought girls were the ones always on them damn phones. He was afraid women wouldn't be interested in the 3DS, because of the ever dominant presence of the mobile device.
Iwata talks Animal Crossing: New Leaf sales, demographics, and more with Nikkei - Animal Crossing World
Mr. Iwata recently had a chat with Nikkei in Japan about a variety of topics including Animal Crossing. Read all about it below: What's probably most
animalcrossingworld.com
I didn't play Animal Crossing: New Leaf. So that stuff about it appealing to women must be true, because I'm not a woman. But the war against mobile was on for Nintendo. People had been goading them, "Just go mobile." It made no sense, between the 3DS and the Vita it was clear who was winning. If anyone should go mobile it's Sony. But the taunts remained the same for Nintendo: Go third party. You can't compete with mobile third party. Put your games on PC while you're at it.
Speaking of the war on mobile, this Tweet from 2013 said that by 2014, there would be more mobile devices on the Internet than PCs. So the mobile takeover was showing no signs of slowing down.
Maybe this is why Reddit overtook GameFAQs in 2014? The mobile takeover continued to influence gaming and the Internet and everything else. Picture this...
2014. "Sins of the Father" stirs your heart as you re-listen to the Metal Gear Solid V trailer from last year's E3. After 6 years it's time once again for a main line Metal Gear Solid game. Just as MGS4 came out with Brawl, MGSV will come out with Smash 4. Part of it will, anyway. You're going to be teased with Ground Zeroes, but later you'll get Phantom Pain. And it's making people think: How much are you actually supposed to pay to play one level of a game, really? But you're not worried about that now. You're hyped for a new main MGS game! Why? Because recently you saw this video.
And that video led to another "This Is How You Don't Play" video, and then another, and you learned about a guy named DarksydePhil. A guy so fun to hate, that you wanna actually be there in the stream when he plays MGSV. You wanna be there with the rest of the hatedom, laughing at his misery, there to see the soon-to-be clipped moments as the unfold. Look at him suffer! He thinks the game is bad because he can't manage the controls. Well YOU managed to complete the Metal Gear Solid games, so DarksydePhil is just being a baby. And so you've earned the right to laugh at his whining. Kojima Nation!
It's just... Quiet. You don't wanna sound like a Kojima hater or nothin', but her depiction. Frankly if Kojima hadn't said anything, you probably wouldn't have minded. You get to go on a beach date with Paz in her underwear in Peace Walker and you were able to stifle that. You can convince yourself that Quiet's design maybe isn't exclusively what you'd see in ecchi or something But then it came out that Kojima specified to the character designer that Quiet's design should be "erotic." If he just hadn't said that, any conclusions we drew would've been our fault. But whatever Quiet looks like, the INTENTION itself that he SPECIFIED was "Make it erotic." That's what the design is supposed to be. So he backtracks. "Oh no, mah Eengleesh she's-a no so good, Imma no mean the word 'erotic,' yes?" Clarifying that he meant he wanted to design Quiet so that women would want to cosplay as her. Which didn't help his case. If he doesn't mean "erotic," how does he in his limited English come to that word if what he meant was "Convince women to cosplay as her?" What DID he mean? Bearing in mind that he has absolutely seen women cosplaying as characters from his games. He knows what cosplay is about. So he backtracks again with the famous Tweet, "Once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds." And because Kojima is a genius, apparently, all was forgiven. You are not entirely satisfied with that answer. But this is still "You don't wanna sound like Anita Sarkeesian" days. And you really wanna enjoy hating on DSP. So you have faith that the explanation will pay off. It just better not be something stupid like "She's a solar panel and she needs to be exposed to the sun to do magic." That might've been fine if Kojima said "Design her so that her skin is exposed." But he said "erotic." And that implies a specific thing that's neither here nor there with regard to being a magic solar panel.
What has the Internet video game playing community become, anyway? It feels like the game has changed, and DSP might be the last Let's Player of his kind that you watch. It used to be that Let's Players played every console and/or PC game that was released. Now it seems people would rather play esoteric indie games you've never heard of. And you don't just mean "Papers, Please" or "The Stanley Parable." You mean games like QWOP and Happy Wheels and Flappy Bird. The last game you saw traditionally Let's Played is Super Mario 3D World. Now it seems, despite games being released, today's Let's Player doesn't bother unless it's super AAA. Big news. Like MGSV. As Geoff Keighley predicted, people were mostly shrugging at Tropical Freeze. Before the turn of the decade, you're pretty sure they would not have shrugged at Tropical Freeze. You suspect it's because Let's Players are trying to diversify, so they don't blend in with "the pile." Stand out. Play games you're not gonna see get played on other channels. Unless that game is really demanded by the audience. Like Tropical Freeze isn't. Voice over gameplay isn't enough anymore. You gotta have a facecam. And you gotta have multiple revenue streams. You're not sure when it happened. You feel like it has something to do with this Patreon thing that's been making news. It's like Kickstarter except you keep paying forever??? Cable is, what, $75 a month? For several channels. Many of which you actually watch. For you to pay a YouTuber's Patreon, you would need to be getting to same value. You're essentially paying for the one channel, a channel that's technically not on all the time. How much should one channel cost? For "TV" that is often only a few minutes long? We laugh at DSP for being money hungry like this, but so many of these up and coming Let's Players are doing it too. It's too bad. You have no interest in being Tobuscus or Markiplier. But that's the face of the Let's Player nowadays. If only you had actually gotten started when you should've.
You might also remember 2014 as the year Elliot Rodger committed his atrocity. And sometimes you might hear people ask "Why didn't he just try Tinder? It's so easy!"
Why didn't Eliot Rodger use Tinder?
Answer: Tinder didn’t exist back then. Eliot Rodgers had a deep blame / anger / resentment for women because he couldn't get a date or girlfriend. The problem was, it didn't seem like he ever really approached a woman. If he did, he didn't do it often. He also obsessed over how incredible having ...
www.quora.com
And the answer comes back "Tinder didn't exist back then." Even though technically yes it did, it just it wasn't balls deep into the zeitgeist like it is today. Nor was Rodger himself, or incel culture. r/incels was still essentially dead. But by 2014 things were getting started. "Swipe right" had officially entered the lexicon, as well as "Uber" and "Lyft" and lots of other phone appy words. All for the presence of the almighty mobile device. And Rodger himself had earned a spot on various "Most Disturbing Killers" YouTube listicles. For a while, the most reputation that incels will have is some sort of very small Dark Webbish sect. A very very niche thing. But the ball was rolling. Talk about it a little more later.
[Gaming]
To be painfully honest, my 2014 was consumed by one thing: How I spent my E3, and the ensuing weeks/months after that talking about the stuff at E3. My conscience was already busy with MGSV and Quiet, but then came Nintendo in 2014. There was Palutena and her, let's say "gazey" reveal trailer for Smash Bros, there was Devil's Third being a Wii U exclusive, Bayonetta 2, of course, any one of these games would've been bad enough to get the "it's not meant to be sexual you're misinterpreting it" gaslight. But these were ALL featured in the same Nintendo Treehouse event. Considered worthy of sharing the stage with the "family friendly" Nintendo brand. And it wasn't just me that found that weird. I can't find it, and refuse to go look for it, but during the Bayonetta 2 gameplay demonstration the Platinum Games rep remarked how they had designed some Nintendo-themed outfits for the game, and one of them was a Princess Peach dress, and Platinum was all like "Y'know this is Nintendo and all, do you want us to maybe tone down the sexuality in the costumes?" And Nintendo was like "No, don't do that." And Platinum thought that was weird and surprising. That Nintendo of all companies would allow this. See, it's not just me that finds this weird. But Nintendo insists that there's nothing remarkable about it or any of their E3 2014 showing. It really bothered me. And by this time I had some experience as a NeoGAF poster. So after the id of E3 wore off and the time for measured reflection came, I made a thread raising the touchy subject of "fanservice" in video games. And it was a touchy subject. I can't find it, and refuse to go look for it, but there was a thread on NeoGAF that was dedicated to laughing at "creepy" sexualized content in games. Dead or Alive here, sexy MMORPG ads there. Then somebody brought up Bayonetta and the thread devolved into angry chaos. And someone brought up a point that really rung true to me: People give Bayonetta a pass because her games are good. It's easy to complain about how creepy Xtreme Beach Volleyball is because it's also not a good or fun game franchise. And so cognitive dissonance kicks in. Bayonetta can't be the male fantasy. Even though the game ends with an exhibitionist dance video that serves no purpose other than to give the player something to enjoy sexually. A woman designed her! And the gameplay is technically flawless! So it can't count.
This was basically the defense I was given in the thread I made on NeoGAF. But because it was NeoGAF, it wasn't just players. It was journalists, it was staff at developer studios and localization companies who had a lot to say about how wrong I was about PS Vita lewdware, the industry names I had longed to reach out and touch. People complain about how games are soy and have bent to the SJW whim, but in 2014, in this NeoGAF thread, it was very much not that time yet. "Look past the sexual aspects" they said. "Me and my wife love this game" they said. I couldn't help but feel like maybe I wasn't reaching them. So I kept at the thread. I thought about it on the way to work, and on the way home from work. I couldn't visit NeoGAF at work, it was filtered, but I still wrote notes about what I wanted to say in the thread. "I'm just not explaining myself properly. They should know where I'm coming from. Because they have problems with other games. The sexy MMORPG ads. If they're saying the games at Nintendo Treehouse didn't count, then the sexy MMORPG ads don't count! Therefore if they see a problem with the sexy MMORPG ads, they should be able to see similar in these Nintendo Treehouse games." The thread dragged on, for weeks. And then it just dried up. And to be honest, I was thankful. I came to realize, there was no winning it. And I just wanted to be done. Or at least take some more time to form my arguments. What weren't they getting??? Or maybe I don't get it. If there's one thing I can't stand against, it's the word of the creators/people who own the rights. Platinum says I'm wrong about Bayonetta. Nothing gratuitous or titillating about that dance. And so I just have to accept that. Like I did with other games and shows before. Accept it and move on to something else. It's just, 2014 gave me a lot more than usual to accept and move on from. I can accept and move on from Bayonetta. But I've also got a bone to pick with Nintendo. And Wonderful 101. And Devil's Third. And Kid Icarus. And Fire Emblem. And maybe even a little bit of Hyrule Warriors. And if through all of this Nintendo swears to me that I'm wrong and that there's nothing but family friendliness in their brand? 2014 is too much. Yes, a Smash game is on the way. But you'll never forget 2014's lineup. Every time I boot up my Wii U would mean seeing Bayonetta in WaraWara Plaza because that's a Nintendo title they wanna lead with. I can't deal with that level of bullshit. I can't deal with Nintendo wanting to be Mario on the streets but Bayonetta in the sheets. Can't be both. So... looking at Nintendo and seeing nothing but hypocrisy now, I decided I was done with Nintendo. But it wasn't just Nintendo I was done with. What I needed was a company that would stand up for the values I needed to be represented. That would call a spade a spade, that would call porn when they saw it. But the truth is, the rest of the game industry doesn't really care like I care. I'm not saying Microsoft is on that stage giving us close-ups of Cortana's ass, but whatever modesty they might practice in their games, it's not out of any mission to not be the next Bayonetta. At best, they just don't care. At worst, they'd love to be Bayonetta, she earned a perfect 10 and what few people are buying her games seem to find her so empowering. Because I guess getting naked at the player's command is fine if you're the main character? And it was the hypocritical journalists too. Who have so much to say about how Dead or Alive & Ninja Gaiden are creepy but Bayonetta is not. All are fighting games that have beautiful women in them, it's just one happens to be really really good as far as combo-based fighting gameplay is concerned. And as journalists they should be able to acknowledge both. By all means, don't disregard the gameplay. But if you hate tiddy and booty in your video games, call it out even when it's painful. Like Arthur Gies did.
Bayonetta 2 review: heaven and hell
It left me asking how many different ways Platinum could find to run a camera between Bayonetta’s legs
www.polygon.com
For his honesty he was marginalized in the industry, and made a laughingstock by the audience. An opinion that haunted him for years later, if it doesn't still haunt him. It's not just Nintendo, it's not just the game companies, it's the game industry as a whole. From the shit-eating grins in corporate management who have the most perfectly inoffensive words to say about their games, to the fucking hypocrite consumers who can't make up their minds over whether or not they want Samus to have heels. When I see Nekkid Teenage Ninja Food Fight, a game that shouldn't even have made it out of Japan, on the front page of GameTrailers, I know that the gaming world has gone very wrong for me. Where once I had the security that things like that would never happen, I have it no longer? And so I gave up video gaming itself as a cope. Gave my hardware and games to my nephew that very Christmas. No playing games, no making games, no dreams of being a Let's Player or a sprite Flash video maker or reviewer or article writer or whatever the hell. No following the news, no watching E3, and absolutely no NeoGAF. I tried to stick around on GameFAQs because Poll of the Day wasn't specifically related to video games, but over time even that started to drift away from me. I talked a lot about video games there, and without that to talk about I had nothing to post about, and therefore no reason to be on the forum. This was also a decisive blow in the "2D vs. 3D" battle. My love of hentai and ecchi and saving/sourcing pictures of it came into sudden question. The porn I'm enjoying, that doujin I'm saving and learning Japanese so I can understand it, is it one of those "Don't treat this like porn treat this like a serious work of art" pieces? Maybe it isn't. But you can never be too sure. One day you're engrossed in Tinkle Bell's "Rondo Duo," next thing you're reading reviews pleading "Please look past the pornographic aspects and enjoy it for whatever else is worth enjoying in this game." Like with video games, you're seeing too much of this going on nowadays. What you need is porn that acts as a deliberate counter signal to the "Treat this like art" porn. Porn that states emphatically "This is porn, do not mistake this for anything else. If you're here for non-porn reasons, you're in the wrong place." But like in the games industry, nobody really cares that much. But [Weebshit] is more than the lewds you save. It's the Saturday morning cartoons you watch. How about those? Is that cope still there? Not by the end of 2014. That new programming block Vortexx didn't last long. The block, and its website, just ground to an abrupt absence. And I was staying far away from Adult Swim's Toonami. I used to be able to watch Digimon Fusion, but that moved to premium cable. This left Saturday mornings on Cartoon Network as my only option. Which was a death slot as it was. I had seen so many shows last one season or half a season and then just be replaced with reruns of Teen Titans Go! The only reliable programming I had was Pokémon, and because it was a Nintendo product I wasn't exactly in love with the partnership. But maybe I don't have to watch cartoons. Was there anything at all to get into? Not on actual TV their wasn't, not yet. And Netflix wouldn't have anything until 2016. I was too early for the "Cord Cutting Renaissance" when all of the quality TV moved to streaming services. It was either Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad.
No video games. No 2D. Not even anything to watch on TV. The most basic, most universal of copes. I could not even watch TV. I had no Internet community to shitpost to, and nothing to shitpost about. And my job? Suddenly my job started to suck a lot more. Nothing changed about my job, just my outlook changed. I didn't have the copes. It was okay that my job sucked because I was gonna do some kind of video game thing with my life. Or make friends with lewd artists and confab with the lewd community or something. I lost that. And without that now I have to ask myself "So what ARE you gonna do with your life? You're 41 going on 42, is this where you should be? If you're not gonna be in some kind of game thing?" I hadn't gotten a raise in all the years I had been there. I was starting to get anxious. I started looking into things like "How long should I work somewhere before I get a raise/promoted?" I figure it'd been 6-7 years here, I should be due some kind of change. Then I read these articles.
Up or out? When to leave if you're not getting promoted - Workopolis Blog
You can't sit around forever waiting to get promoted. Here's how you can know when to wait and when to move on, and what you can do in the meantime.
careers.workopolis.com
Job hopping is the new normal - Workopolis Blog
We've heard complaints from employers about 'job hopping' candidates who show no loyalty to their jobs. So the Workopolis team took a look at how long on average Canadians are staying in their jobs. It turns out that the way we work is changing quickly.
careers.workopolis.com
6 years is way too long, according to Workopolis and their "millions of resumes." I dunno, I've never used Workopolis, but over 80% of them stay at one job no longer than 4 years. And reading that, I pondered how I would either negotiate a raise/promotion, or get a new job. I tried the former. My manager was adamant, there was nothing for me. He says I'm a freelance/contract hire. So I can't be "promoted" per se. It was the first I had heard of it, I didn't know I was a freelancer. So I started looking for other jobs. But... I couldn't find anything that pays as much as my current job. That will definitely hire me. 2014 was arguably my darkest era.
It was also a dark era for the world. Or at least things were starting to darken. I had cloistered myself from the world, so I wasn't really aware, but a lot of sociopolitical events were taking place that would define the Internet and all of the people on it for years to come. 2014 saw the birth of ISIS. The "Smash Bros. 4" of jihadist terrorism. We were riding high off the death of Bin Laden, we had done it, al-Qaeda was no more and the Middle East was about to become the new Russia. In that we were gonna put McDonalds' everywhere and bring our American capitalist bikini car washes to their culture. But no, none of those things happened. Speaking of Russia and how the Cold War was supposed to be an 80s thing, Vladimir Putin was making himself an international villain again. Sure he'd assassinated a few dissidents, that's not news. What WAS news was how he annexed Crimea. Taking physical territory. Actual global domination moves. Being ignored by intergovernmental organizations used to be a thing we associated with, like, North Korea. Not any of those "civilized" European countries. There's no way anything like that could happen in Europe today. Trayvon Martin had been shot in 2013, and that was bad enough. But 2014 saw the deaths-by-cop of both Eric Garner and Michael Brown. This gave rise to the Ferguson riots, but also Black Lives Matter. The Fappening had repercussions for laws and platform policies about "involuntary porn." Which I always thought was an overreach. Because The Fappening was pictures that were stolen. But because it was so widespread (what were all of those women doing taking nudes anyway, I never took no nudes is that just a really common thing or what), websites started being like "No one can post ANY pictures without express written consent from the subject." And how are you even gonna prove that? You can't. But if you're on Reddit like "He's some pictures I took of my ex-girlfriend" the assumption is she doesn't know they're being posted. But... she consented to having them taken. And before The Fappening you used to be able to do whatever you wanted with someone pictures that you got fair and square. The Fappening was not about pictures that the leakers got fair and square so it shouldn't be used as an example for policy on pictures that were taken fair and square. Speaking of involuntary porn, 2014 saw the beginning of the end for Bill Cosby, by the hand of Hannibal Buress. Doing the Ronan Farrow thing before Ronan Farrow. And? There was Gamergate. A lot of important stuff happened in 2014, but I think Gamergate was really what gave rise to the "Acronym SJWs vs. Alt-White /Pol/ack" narrative that dominates the Internet today. Maybe Gamergate just happened at the time time, maybe it had more to do with it being 2014 and social media giving more voice to the rabble than ever. But this was before r/The_Donald, this was before "Can't Stump The Trump," before the Ellen Pao controversies, it was Gamergate where names like Milo Yiannopoulos gained their notoriety. Which was really something because when I last checked, that "argle bargle male fantasy" culture war that Gamergate was predicated on was nonsense when I was saying it. When Anita Sarkeesian was the main voice associated with it. But just as I hang up my hat, the idea of games needing to appeal more to whammin takes off so much that there's vocal rebuttal to it. Didn't happen when I was doing it. If you were mad about boobs or butts you were pretty quickly shut up. Then along comes Zoe Quinn and suddenly people wanna have less boobs and butts in their video games. I missed it by that much. I really could've used Gamergate.
But i was in hermitage. When, if ever, would I wake up? Maybe I wake up in 2015 or 2016. Talk about that in a bit. As long as I'm at my parents' house I have time to type.
New 
I had to stop by Wal-Mart yesterday to pick up some stuff to drink. Non-alcoholic because I'm a pussy baby. At my local Wal-Mart they mix the wines with the non-alcoholic sparkling ciders and grape juices. But you know what else they put over there? Condoms. Because Wal-Mart knows that wine and sex mix.
