I Have no Sympy for “Sarah” Nyberg

So some big things have been going down recently. A rabid tranny SJW by the name of Nicky “Sarah” Nyberg who opposed #GamerGate was recently ousted as a pedophile (ignore the WN stuff, no one gives a fuck about that) and suddenly all the big SJWs on twitter are scrambling to cover for him. Recently, he posted some really dumb rant on medium where he tries to insist that none of what he did or said was really his fault and it comes down to how awful internet edgelord culture is and how he’s the victim despite showing naked pictures of his pre-pubesecent cousin to his friends online.

Nyberg’s entire rant centers around how miserable he is that his posting career has caught up to him. Admittedly, that’s a minor concern of mine too. Tomorrow, I go into an Unnamed Postal Service for a job interview. But even if I know for a fact that I’m safe, the familiar anxiety haunts me that someone will tell the HR rep that I’m an evil white nationalist reactionary who makes mean and edgy jokes online and that’s a chance at good money down the toilet. So realistically, I should feel sympathy for “Sarah” Nyberg, right?

Wrong.

See, I found out via their forums that I might be able to get a position as editor for TheRightStuff.biz. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but the idea of me being an editor for a site that regularly gets thousands of hits per day is overwhelming. I’m still in shock and disbelief that they’d even want my written work on their site. But at the same time, I’m incredibly proud that I’m being recognized for putting in effort to help build and organize a community and a movement. If it was any other website, I’d be putting this on my resume. But I can’t. Hell, I can’t even use my real name when publishing stuff for TRS. The only reason I do so here is because I know it’s obscure enough to keep people from finding it when they google my name. I have to lurk amongst the shadows, and it’s because of “people” (I use that term loosely) like Nyberg.

Nyberg and anti-#GamerGate have spent their entire existence trying to make sure that anyone who publicly speaks up against feminism, racial egalitarianism, and the rest of the dildo that’s getting shoved up western civilization’s ass is quickly rendered unemployable and impossible to socialize with. Make no mistake about it, they want us exiled, if not dead. I’ll confess, I’ve been suicidal before: nothing snaps you out of it like realizing that most people will cheer for your suicide while only your family will mourn you. And given my sister’s reaction to when I casually dropped the N-bomb in the middle of a conversation, I doubt it would even be my entire family.

That’s how cancerous leftism is- it makes you revel in the destruction of good men and women who stand up for what they believe in, people who want to secure a future for their children instead of letting them be raped. It forces you to hide away while mentally disturbed pedophiles are celebrated and cheered on. It’s an evil ideology espoused by evil people. Heroes like Chuck C. Johnson are forced off of twitter while subhumans like Deray McKesson are given invites to Yale.

So no, I don’t feel sorry at all about Nyberg’s past catching up to him. Right now, he’s a victim of the society that he built. No, not teenage edgelording, but rabid callout-culture leftism. I’ve been banned from twitter more times than I can count, and I know Nyberg was responsible for at least one of those bans. I know he also associated with the scumbag who called my parents to try and threaten me, and also pushed for one of my idols to be deported. He is, both directly and indirectly, responsible for one of the biggest obstacles in my struggle to carve out an independent living. He’s part of the reason why I can’t call up all my family and friends and tell them about my possible editorial gig even though I desperately want to. He’s a vile creature, a subhuman piece of filth who celebrates in the destruction of all that is good and pure. Him and people like him will gleefully admit to making life difficult to people like me, and lament that there are consequences to their actions.

So no, I have no sympy for Nicky. None whatsoever. And Nicky, if you’re reading this, I suggest you do what I told you to months ago: go deep-throat a 12-gauge. You contribute nothing positive to this world or the people who live in it. We would all be better off without you. You are a sick and twisted degenerate who only exists to hurt perfectly good people. Fuck off and die, scum.

A followup: Some people have taken issue with that last paragraph. Fine, whatever, it’s edgy, I’ll admit. I had some reservations about posting it because even I believe in decorum. But at the same time, I honestly do want Nicky to kill himself. For those of you who think I’m being extreme, I want you to put yourself in my shoes: imagine that the one part of your life that you’re proud of above all else, the one thing that you legitimately light up when you think about, is also one of if not the most hated and despised things in modern western society. Imagine trying to hide such a major part of your life from your friends, your family, and even your own partner (yes, the irony of being openly gay but closeted alt-right is not lost on me). Imagine the consistent fear of being discovered and losing everything, with no backup net. Imagine the pain from your own father telling you that he was “disappointed” in you chasing your dreams and doing what you loved, when he was the one to tell you to do just that.

Understand where I’m coming from before lashing out at me. Understand the double life that I have to live just so I can have any life at all. Understand the continuous daily turmoil I have to face. Understand the looming threat that no matter how hard I try to protect myself, my entire life could be shattered in an instant by some hook-nosed vermin at the SPLC or ADL. I’m only 21. I have a bright future ahead of me, but it could be destroyed in an instant thanks to scum like Nyberg and the environment that they’ve created. So yes, I’m angry, hateful, and bitter. But I think in this case, I’m right to be. I’ve done nothing wrong, but I’m still the villain. Meanwhile a tranny child predator is now seen as the “hero”. If I didn’t get angry, I’d be insane.

And just when I think I’m done, people on NeoGAF are illustrating my point perfectly: “Out any Gater and report their status to their families, their bosses, their teachers.” Fuck these cancerous little shits. I would love nothing more than to hear them scream as I throw them out of a helicopter. Is that edgy? Maybe, but can you blame me at this point?

Breaking Down the Tale of Tales Death Rattle

This is a long goddamn post, so bear with me.

HATRED: The TRV Review

When Hatred was announced in October last year, I knew it was going to be something special. In January, I wrote down my thoughts on it. The post blew up, and was the first thing I ever wrote to be linked to on Xenosystems. I even got recognition from outside the reactosphere when the award-winning developer Adrian Chmielarz of The Astronauts linked it. Now that it’s been released, I feel obligated to give a full review of the game. I don’t really have a set review rubric, so I’ll try to break it down into general categories.

First, for my #GamerGate followers and try to disclose as much as I think I need to. I was gifted this game by a friend. I have no ties to Destructive Creations outside of my voting to greenlight the game. I am perfectly conscious of my political and social biases. I’m going to assume that if you read my blog, you more than likely are too. So without further ado, let’s take a good look at Hatred!

THE STORY: SHORT, SWEET, TO THE POINT.

Hatred shows its arcade roots by keeping the story to an absolute bare minimum. The player character, a tall, long and dark-haired man only known as either “the Antagonist”, “the Crusader”, “Hatred Guy”, or “Notim Portant”, commences a mission to kill as many people as possible. The story starts off with the tutorial, where the Antagonist does some final practicing for his rampage: some obstacle course running, shooting and grenade drills, and finally murdering a drugged-up captive just to get the feel for taking life. From there, we’re treated to a brief monologue, the (in)famous one from the very first trailer. The Antagonist steps out of his house, and the first level immediately begins. He starts in rural New York, but after hopping on a train to evade police learns of a nearby nuclear powerplant, which he then sets his sights on.

And that’s it. There’s no twists or turns to his story, no supporting characters, nothing. Hatred is very “old school”. The game, as I’ll elaborate later on, is a throwback to old arcade twin-stick shooters like Smash TV, Mercs, and Robotron 2084. Likewise, so is the story. You learn pretty much everything you need to know about the main character and his goals in the first cutscene. The other cutscenes, barring the ending, only serve to conclude the level you just finished and introduce the next one. The ending caps off the game and provides a solid conclusion to the story.

And really, that’s just fine for a simple game like Hatred. Twin-stick shooters don’t need complex, deep plots. We don’t need to know why the Antagonist wants to kill everyone and why he loves it. In fact, the game would probably be worse off if he did. Nuance in this case would take away from the stark, brutal simplicity of the game’s overall aesthetic. Hatred is a very blunt game that never really strays from the core of the subject matter: the Antagonist’s mission to kill as many people as humanly possible.

THE VISUALS: UP IS DOWN, BLACK IS WHITE

I didn’t like Unreal Engine 3. Everything just looked ugly, both in stills and in motion. Some of the ugliest-looking games of the last generation that I can recall used Unreal 3. So when I saw the Unreal Engine Logo on the first trailer, I rolled my eyes. Hatred certainly does have the characteristic ugliness of an Unreal Engine game. However, like all the other flaws, it works to Hatred‘s advantage.

See, in Hatred, the player sees the world through the eyes of the Antagonist. Not literally, of course, but figuratively. So it makes sense that the world is nothing but a dull, generic grey. How else would a mass-murderer see things? Everything is ugly and dull and you can’t help but love destroying whatever you can. Indeed, the greyscale only makes the actually quite nice fire and explosion effects look even better. Indeed, while the world looks boring by default, it looks fucking incredible when you tear it to pieces with an automatic weapon. Indeed, it almost compelled me to destroy whatever I could in hopes that it would brighten up the screen a bit.

Another issue that works out quite well for Hatred is the limited amount of NPC models. I’d imagine that since this game was made in Poland over the course of 7 months, it didn’t have the largest budget. It certainly shows in the NPCs. For all the talk of the game being a “Neo-nazi murder simulator” I couldn’t make out the race or gender of the people I was gunning down at all. The women all had short hair, more than likely due to the physics of long hair being difficult as shown by the Antagonist’s own raven locks. The greyscale world made it hard to figure out who was black and who was white. And that actually fits with the Antagonist’s views perfectly. To him, everyone looks the same. That’s why killing people is so easy to him. There’s nothing special or remarkable about his targets. There’s not supposed to be.

All of that aside, there are some visual issues I just can’t look past. When you perform an execution near a wall, the camera can get fairly glitchy, and bodies can clip into walls and debris. Hopefully this can get patched, but I’m not sure. There is also the matter of various “clever” advertisements that really take me out of the experience and kill my immersion in the game. I’ll get to them later.

The game’s physics and animations are actually excellent. It’s one of those cases where the game looks infinitely better in motion than it does in screenshots. Bodies respond fairly realistically to being shot, barring the armored enemies who will flail wildly as you continue to pump them full of lead in a darkly hilarious animation. Buildings fall apart perfectly, crumbling into rubble. Destruction hasn’t been this fun in years.

Overall, despite having some glaring flaws, the visuals for Hatred are surprisingly good, especially considering the short time it took and low budget it presumably had. In some portions, it looks just as good, if not better than Firaxis’s isometric strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown. There’s a certain artisianship to Hatred, and a clear theme in the design. That’s something I think a lot of games today are missing.

GAMEPLAY: A BLAST FROM THE PAST

Hatred is a classic isometric twin-stick shooter. Your goal is to either get from point A to point B, or to kill X amount of civilians/law enforcement. Along the way there are bonus objectives, where you have to kill a certain number of people at a certain location or kill a certain person, and you’re rewarded with additional respawn points. You have a limited number of respawn points before you have to start the entire level all over again.

Combat is actually pretty fun- the destructive environment forces you to really think on your feet and keep moving at all times. The difficulty ramps up fast, so get used to ducking and weaving from cover to cover, keeping an eye on the radar to know where enemies and civilians (who you can execute to restore health) are. The firefights are fast-paced and frantic, and a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, the gameplay has a few major issues. First off, the controls can feel clunky and awkward. The Antagonist is not as smooth and easy to control as trailers make it look. The drivable vehicles are even worse, being a major pain in the ass. Thankfully, there’s never any forced driving levels, and the ones where you start in a car you can get out at any time. Aiming is just as problematic at times: it’s nearly impossible to fire from an elevated position down to an enemy on the lower end. There’s also the matter of only being able to carry three guns at a time. For such an old-school game, it’s frustrating to see Hatred use one of my least favorite mechanics in modern shooters. Hatred does have one other flaw that comes from being a twin-stick arcade shooter: it’s repetitive as SHIT. Those objectives I listed earlier? Hope you like them because that’s pretty much all you ever do. I get that it goes with the territory, but at the very least couldn’t we have gotten something new?

Even if the missions are boring, the level design sure isn’t. Each level is either designed to feel like a real area or provide a fun break from ordinary levels. Every building can be entered, meaning that you can spend hours just exploring. The only downside is that there aren’t hidden secrets, so often times the exploring is all for nothing. It is still fun, though. Sometimes looking at the environment is great on its own.

AUDIO: A LOT FROM A LITTLE

There’s not much to say about Hatred audio-wise. The soundtrack is all dark ambient, composed by Adam Skorupa. It’s remarkably good, to the point where Destructive Creations even made a video to showcase his vision. But as good as dark ambient is, it’s still just dark ambient. I was expecting something a little less subtle, maybe a mix of industrial, death, sludge, and black metal. Instead, we only get one song in the credits by a band called Iperyt. It’s not all that great, really. Personally, I’ll hold out for mods introducing a better soundtrack.

The rest of the sound isn’t anything out of the ordinary. The guns and explosions are all nice and loud. The voice acting, done by actors whose other works I can’t find, is fairly inconsistent. Some NPCs beg for their lives convincingly, others don’t. The Antagonist’s gruff, raspy voice sometimes sounds menacing, other times it seems laughable. At one point I was pretty sure I could hear his Polish accent slipping through. It’s nothing particularly great, but hardly awful either.

A TALE OF TWO HATREDS

Ultimately, the game’s biggest issue comes from its identity crisis. There really are two Hatreds. One is a fun twin-stick shooter where you destroy everything in your path all with a flavor of grim comedy. The other is a bleak, nihilist experience designed to disturb you and make you uncomfortable. And Hatred really can’t decide which one it wants to be.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Early on in the first level, I shot a woman. She fell to the ground. I closed in for the execution. She was crying, begging not to die, and The Antagonist just casually shot her a few times, like she was nothing. As the killing continued, I heard him say “Only my weapon understands me,” a direct quote from Postal 2. So I went from a genuinely disturbing scene to a clever shout-out that made me chuckle. There was some serious mood whiplash, to say the least.

Another good example would be the shift in tone between two levels. On one level, you start in a hijacked SWAT truck with the goal of killing 100 people. You have the bonus goals of using a switchboard to trigger a train crash and disrupting an arms deal to kill everyone there. When you kill 100 people, you then have to move on to the train station, where you then need to fight off a certain number of law enforcement and national guard. The entire level feels grounded in reality- it would be quite easy to kill a large number of people at a train station if you really wanted to. There’s a feeling of discomfort.

The next level, though, is the middle of a town. You start the level by disrupting a political rally, and your goal is again to kill a certain number of people. This time, however, the bonus goals are to kill the candidate fleeing the rally, break into a bank and burn all the money in it, go to the release of the latest “aPad” and kill all the hipsters there, kill all the hipsters in the coffee shop, and raid a gun sale where people are selling automatic weapons, flamethrowers, and fucking rocket launchers (It’s pretty obvious this game was made in Poland, because good luck finding a pistol with a ten-round capacity for sale in New York). The town is plastered with ads that in turn are dripping with dry, dark humor. One that really stood out was a tobacco billboard that just said “FUCK YOUR LUNGS!”. Again, I felt like I had went from a serious game to some sort of comedy.

I’m chalking this one up to it being Destructive Creation’s first game. Hatred feels really experimental at times. It’s a very weird feeling, though, because when it isn’t feeling experimental, it feels like an old-school throwback. Had Hatred committed either to one vision or the other, the game would have flowed a lot better. But instead, we’re left with a confusing, disorienting, poorly paced game.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Hatred is a flawed, but still solid debut for Destructive Creations. It’s a bold, take-no-prisoners step forward that’s gotten a lot of eyes on the studio. Like it or not, Hatred has made a major impact on gaming. There’s a lot of issues with the game, but not enough to keep it from being an ultimately enjoyable experience. I would almost certainly recommend Hatred to anyone wanting a fun shoot-’em-up or someone looking for a grimdark experience outside of Warhammer 40,000. As of now, it’s 20 bucks on steam, which is a pretty nice price. Now then, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to listen to some old school black metal.

Punishment is Vindication

Some days, I feel like the only neoreactionary who isn’t gifted in tech. I can barely code with HTML or java, god forbid I take on anything more daunting than that. Even bbcode is a hassle. I might be good at assembling computers, but I’m certainly no programmer, nor will I ever pretend to be. So as far as I know, Urbit is just Moldbug’s grandiose tech project that isn’t related to video games. As far as I know, it’s all magic. Despite my periodic insights on the culture and such (which doesn’t require understanding the nuance of code) I really don’t follow tech. For me, “Strangeloop” just makes me think of how I accidentally figured out how to break a computer in high school with infinite dialogue boxes when I just wanted to make a basic arithmetic calculator. Much to my surprise, it’s actually one of the bigger tech conferences in the US. Shows how much I know.

So when Curtis Yarvin, AKA, Mencius Moldbug, commonly recognized grandfather of neoreaction was listed as a speaker at Strangeloop, suddenly I decided I had to pay attention. After all, Moldbug is, in my opinion, the best politicial writer of the 21st century. Maybe he’d offer some new nuggets of wisdom for us. Maybe he’d explain Urbit in a way someone as primitive as me could understand. But beyond that, there was also the political ramification of Moldbug speaking. It’s not easy being a reactionary- all the white cis male privilige in the world doesn’t make up for the unwashed hordes of progressive lunatics who would gladly see you dead if it meant no one would ever think the way you do. That Moldbug could openly present his work at Strangeloop and participate in the tech community as an open reactionary is a glimmer of hope that we can’t be so easily excluded.

Or at least it was. As of now, Moldbug is no longer invited to speak about Urbit at Strangeloop. As always, militant communists and leftists raised quite the stink about a reactionary. In their mind, the most damning post possible was this one, a long defense of Thomas Carlyle where where he makes references to the idea that hey, maybe slavery isn’t that bad all things considered. Moldbug dresses up the point as politely and nicely as he can, and the progs still lost their mind. From the prog responses, you’d think that weev had snuck back in the US to give a talk. People were actually saying that Curtis Yarvin, a thirty-something computer nerd, was somehow a safety threat because of his political unorthodoxy. It’s mindblowing. Of all the figures in the alt-right, Moldbug is probably the least threatening person possible.

So what did Strangeloop’s organizers do? Probably the most morally and ethically deficent option possible. They quietly removed Yarvin’s page on his talk and sent him an e-mail rescinding his invitation due to the sheer number of complaints filed. Presumably, their goal was hoping that this would all go away, and they could have their conference in peace. However, they seem to have been missing what’s been going on for the past nine months with #GamerGate. We live in the era of the Streisand effect. Nothing just “goes away” anymore.  Within hours, the story blew up. Prolific neoreactionary figureheads Nick B. Steves and Duck Enlightenment were tweeting up a storm, and AnCap loose cannon Clarkhat was going even further in upping the pressure on Strangeloop. In what has to be a first, Moldbug’s work was noticed outside of the liberal hate brigade, as even Breitbart had picked up the story. This is Web 2.0. Stories don’t just “go away”. And if you want to try to make them go away? I suggest talking to Zoe Quinn to see how well that’s turned out for her.

And now, with everyone demanding answers, Strangeloop organizer Alex Miller finally publishes a brief explanation of what’s going on:

“Curtis Yarvin submitted a talk in the Strange Loop 2015 Call for Presentations. The talk went through the review process and was one of about 60 talks selected for the conference out of about 360. The subject of the talk was urbit (attached below). While we use a multi-stage review process, ultimately all final decisions are made by me.

Earlier this week we published the bulk of the 2015 Strange Loop session list, including Curtis’s talk. I quickly received feedback that Curtis also has an online persona under the name “Mencius Moldbug” where he has posted extensive political writings.

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis’s writings objectionable.I have not personally read them.

I am trying to create a conference where the focus is on the technology and the topics being presented. Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus. This would not serve the conference, the other speakers, the attendees, or even Curtis.

Thus, I chose to rescind Curtis’s invitation and remove him from the program. The email I sent to Curtis is included below for reference.”

Hilariously enough, said e-mail had already been leaked, so this hardly helps the case. But I want to highlight one particular part of that statement: “Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus.” So in other words, it’s not that he personally found Moldbug’s words objectionable, or that he’s even taking a side. Rather, he’s simply trying to avoid trouble at his conference. It seems innocent, until you realize what he’s saying: it doesn’t matter who Curtis Yarvin is- the feelings of the angry progressive lynch mob is more important than letting an independent software developer speak. It’s flat-out cowardice. It’s a refusal to take a stand and define your own values.

But all in all, I’m okay with this. Because while I might not understand tech, I DO understand SJW holy wars. And once again, we come back to the broken windows. I’ve blogged about broken windows so much that I’m expecting Paul Krugman will throw a brick through my own window with a note on how it’ll save the economy.  But in essence, the SJWs here are working right out of the broken window playbook. In their case, they call it “no platform”, and it’s rooted in British student unions. The idea is that if anyone deemed racist or fascist can be allowed to speak at the university or hold office in a student body, then it means those viewpoints are acceptable. Thus, it is in the interest of the greater good that these individuals are totally excluded from university life, as to prevent the students from thinking that racism or fascism is acceptable. What we’re seeing here is no platform in action. The SJWs know that if Moldbug can present Urbit freely, then it shows that being a reactionary is acceptable. Thus, in order to suppress reaction, Curtis Yarvin must not have a platform to speak on.

And yes, no platform is extended to the rest of the west as well. Why do you think that feminists are up in arms every time Christina Hoff Sommers gets to speak at a university? Why do SJWs of the SF/F community go berserk when they see that Vox Day is on a Hugo ballet? Why are gaming SJWs raining fire down on the Society of Professional Journalists for even trying to host a #GamerGate debate? Because in their mind, anything allowing these people, from the mild-mannered C.H. Sommers to someone as radical as Vox Day to participate grants those people and their views legitimacy. And they know that once a dangerous person gets their foot in the door, they’re VERY hard to get rid of.

The kicker here is that Moldbug knows all of this. It’s all a part of what he calls The Cathedral. (For more on that, I have a handy explanation here) It proves him right- that the progressive powers that be want to make sure that all information on tech and the development of technology is in the hands of progressives. Thus, progressive politics can continue their march to oblivion.Did Mencius Moldbug expect Curtis Yarvin to be shut down? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But either way, by working to exclude Curtis Yarvin from tech, Strangeloop has vindicated the work of Mencius Moldbug. Everything he’s said about progressives needing to control information is validated by them shutting him down.

That’s why, despite condemning the cowardice and moral failings of Alex Miller and Strangeloop, I’m still celebrating this as a victory. Another key component of neoreactionary thought has been proven right in practice. It’s often said that the comments section for any article on feminism proves the need for feminism. I could spend ages debunking that myth, but let me simply pose a theorem of my own- the responses taken to neoreaction only proves neoreaction to be right.

GDC, DiGRA, and the Delusions of Academia

One thing I’m glad #GamerGate has done is helped spread awareness of what’s going on in the gaming industry. Before all of this, I had never even HEARD of DiGRA. Honestly, now I’m starting to wish I hadn’t, because the sheer degeneracy on display makes me physically ill. I’m not even sure why I’m so shocked- when I was in college I witnessed first hand how genuinely awful academia was. But DiGRA manages to take things to a new level, that just astounds me.

To begin with, let’s talk about why academia is so awful. If you want a primer on why I generally disdain higher education, you can start here. The goal of academia can generally be summarized as advancing society through research. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s almost entirely redundant in a capitalist society. The largest innovations in technology and science in recent years have almost always come from the private sector. After all, private sector research inevitably leads to a new commercial product, which leads to more jobs in production, and more goods for sale, which is good for the overall economy of the nation. Of course, not all fields are created equal. If the private sector takes all the hot fields where progress is in high demand, that leaves academia with, well, everything else.

If you’re familiar with the alternative right or even the right at all, you’re well aware of the rest of the picture. If not, let me explain this. Almost all of academia is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. All the work is run through a liberal filter. For instance, if you were to bring up the transformation of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, it would be dismissed as irrelevant due to the authoritarian, legalistic, anti-egalitarian policies of the government. Somehow, the discomfort of a few natives under apartheid invalidates the miraculous success of colonial states like Rhodesia or South Africa. The era of Manifest Destiny and western expansion is somehow treated as a shameful period in American History rather than an ideal time. It’s a complete degenerate cesspit with the most skewed priorities imaginable. Rather than actually advancing society and civilization, a higher priority is put on the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals.

So obviously, this carries over to DiGRA. Let’s compare DiGRA to the GDC for a moment. For all intents and purposes, the GDC is the private sector equivalent of DiGRA. At GDC, you’ll see talks mostly oriented towards the business side of things. For better or worse, DiGRA are professionals. Everything they do is dictated by the industry and the profit motive. As I’ve noted before, you are going to find periodic worthwhile discussions at GDC where real talk can happen. Even the pozzed portion of GDC is still kept in line by capitalism. The feminist talks are given with the intent of gaining and retaining female customers. Hardly ideal, but there could be worse.

And that worse usually finds itself in DiGRA. I browsed the #DiGRA2015 tag today on twitter and was appalled by the sheer nonsense of what I was reading. Most of it was absolutely meaningless- comparisons of Mario to Nichetze, rambling about tabletop game mechanics, and other pretentious nonsense that has no impact on making games that sell. Because DiGRA isn’t for professionals who make games and rely on those games making money- it’s for academics who need grants to justify whatever asinine research they want. None of this is actually beneficial or important to the games industry- it won’t make anyone any money.

As I mentioned in a twitter rant, as a history student, most of this DiGRA nonsense reminds me of Weimar Germany’s “culture” in the sense that it’s totally vapid. Back in the post-war era, Germany was rife with rampant inflation, socialist/anarchist/communist terrorism, and plenty of other problems. However, the intellectual and cultural “elite” of Germany, the artists, filmmakers, and writers, were all more obsessed with making movies about women and gays and the deconstruction of traditional values than they were actually fixing Germany. For all of Hitler’s faults, at the very least he was initially acting for the good of the nation.

The most irritating thing in all of this is that despite their complete lack of worth, DiGRA still has relevance. As Sargon of Akkad has shown, DiGRA writing still finds its way into the gaming press. So as much as I’d love to ignore this little gathering of utterly worthless people, I have to begrudgingly realize that it is a very real problem that exists. Make no mistake- it is for the good of the industry, perhaps even society as a whole, that DiGRA and their degenerate nonsense about “queer mechanics” and such be removed from gaming. They have nothing of value to offer us as gamers. They have nothing of value to offer developers and publishers. They have nothing of value to offer to us at all. They are nothing but a toxic drain upon the community.

So yeah, vitriol and all aside, it should be the goal of #GamerGate to forcibly remove DiGRA from the industry and the culture around it. There should be no quarter for their utterly useless, irrelevant, and outright degenerate nonsense. We must make it overwhelmingly clear that this is our territory, and that they are not welcome.

Time to take the gloves off, #GamerGate

So if you haven’t noticed, my last two posts have been using more and more increasingly extreme rhetoric. I’ve been encouraging #GamerGate to go on the offensive, and mobilize to, for all intents and purposes, thoroughly exterminate SJWs from geek culture. I get that it sounds caustic, and almost like what an SJW would say. Let me explain why I feel the way I do.

Most of #GamerGate are rational, open-minded individuals who are generally benevolent and good-natured. The average #GamerGate member wouldn’t hurt a fly. While that’s fine and good, that often comes with a crippling flaw: the mistaken belief that everyone is as logical and benevolent as you are. The  Much like a freshman discussing foreign policy, they assume all people are rational actors. (Nick B. Steves and I had a conversation on this topic Wednesday.) There remains the foolish notion in #GamerGate that the enemies can be reasoned with and eventually converted to our side. That is blatantly, obviously untrue.

Let me explain recent events to you: SJW complaining prompted Gratipay to order two of my personal idols, weev and Hotwheels, to close their accounts. Likewise, Patreon forcibly removed Encyclopedia Dramatica’s accounts. The aim here is simple: SJWs hope that if they deprive men like weev and Hotwheels of a platform to do business, they will be forced to close up shop and shut down. Their goal is to drive both men out of tech, for the crime of opposing them. They refuse to “coexist”. For them, this is a black-and-white issue: they either most dominate the field, or not participate in it at all.

Likewise, there is the very recent event at the Calgary Expo, where a group of pro-#GamerGate women were forcibly asked to leave, because their booth sold #GamerGate merchandise. It doesn’t matter if they’re a threat or not: the end goal for SJWs is the complete and utter annihilation of #GamerGate and anyone who supports #GamerGate. From there, they can proceed to push their “convert or perish” doctrine onto gaming unopposed.

These are not rational, reasonable human beings. There is no “negotiations” with them. They demand nothing short of total compliance. They do not want peace, they do not want compromise, they do not want coexistence. They want the systemic silencing and marginalization of everyone who is not on their side. Everything is filtered through their worldview: their compassion and empathy is purposefully crippled in order to maximize their effectiveness. Their perception of events is dictated through ideology. Their reactions to events are only based on dogma. They have surrendered their individuality to the greater good.

Thus, #GamerGate needs to realize that SJWs must be removed entirely from gaming and all of nerd culture. We have to stop acting like these are some misguided folks who need to be shown the light. Instead, we have to be more forceful. Don’t even draw the line, just push them back and don’t stop pushing. We must make it very clear that SJWs are not welcome on social media, or in gaming, or in any other environment. We must create an atmosphere where they do not feel invited or welcome. We have to do to them what they want to do to us- anything less will allow them to continue to push their toxic ideology and hurt people.

This isn’t one of my big long thousand-word posts. This is me making things simple: we have to stop humoring the enemy. We need to treat them like enemies. We have to be more aggressive, more brutal, more vicious. Stop yelling at each other over petty stuff like someone calling @srhbutts a dude- he’s the enemy, he doesn’t matter, whatever helps push him out of the picture is good. Leave your perceptions of “right” and “wrong” at the door. This is a culture WAR, not a culture disagreement. War is an ugly, brutal thing, and we must take an ugly, brutal approach in handling our enemy. We cannot stop until we are entirely certain that fandom will be safe from the SJW menace.

That being said, we should still respect neutrals. My theory is that if we put enough pressure on the SJWs, they’ll lash out randomly and wind up attacking neutrals. Suddenly it goes from “both sides are dicks” to “this side is absolute garbage.” Above all else, the neutrals are who we should hold sacred- we’re doing this to protect them from the SJW threat, even if they don’t think it exists. Ultimately, we need to go to the trenches for our hobby. This is going to get ugly, but our goal is a righteous one.

#GamerGate and the Puppy Coup, Round 2: Breaking Windows and Redefining the Norm

Of course I’m going to keep talking about the Hugos, last week was the first post I ever made that made me any money. But seriously, all jokes aside, there’s a lot more I want to talk about on the matter. Like I said last week, this is a big deal. How could I contain it to just one blog post? This is, along with #GamerGate, a defining moment in the history of geek fandom.

What sparked this second post was a reddit conversation by some liberals discussing the broken window effect. For those of you who don’t know, the best description of the broken window effect and its application comes from Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” The idea is that small, petty crimes in urban environments like public drinking, vandalism, and toll-jumping contribute to a social atmosphere where larger, more troublesome crimes like robbery, rape, and assault are more likely to happen. If a window is broken and not fixed, it becomes acceptable to break windows. When breaking windows is acceptable, soon other petty crimes become acceptable. When those crimes become acceptable, larger crimes soon become acceptable. One thing leads to another, and soon you get Detroit.

Broken window theory was one of the driving forces behind Rudy Guliani’s policy that effectively turned New York City around. “The Tipping Point” focuses on the Guliani administration’s cleaning graffiti off of subway cars in order to help curb toll-jumping. By keeping the cars cleaner and nicer, it created an atmosphere that favored civilization over crime. Guliani’s administration cleaned up NYC in other ways as well- he rid Times Square of most of the vice that it was famous for, and made it a family destination. He encouraged a more strict NYPD that cracked down harder on petty crime, creating an atmosphere of public order. In Singapore, the great Lee Kuan Yew did the same thing, cracking down on minor transgressions like spitting, littering, and chewing gum in public as to create order.

Nowadays, broken window theory has fallen out of favor. While only a select few question its effectiveness, liberals soon realized that whenever you build your police policy around the broken windows theory, it means that more black people wind up in prison for criminal behavior. In fact, the idea of improving the neighborhood to keep crime rates down often eventually leads to gentrification. In fact, you could argue that the new ideology of “Dinduism” to spring up from the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown incidents was coined in direct response to broken window theory: it doesn’t matter that Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown or Eric Garner were acting in a way that was detrimental to public order- neighborhood watch or even the police keeping tabs on them to enforce said order is just racist!

The greater irony in all of this is that liberals love to use broken window theory. Of course, rather than use it to preserve public order, they use it to create a more “equal” society. The entire reason why liberals get so mad over “micro-aggressions” is because those are their broken windows- minor, seemingly harmless actions that reinforce bad attitudes which create an undesirable society. Thus, to the liberal, every single bold anti-liberal, anti-leftist transgression that goes unpunished helps set the precedent that this sort of wrongthink is okay.

This explains the mass amount of rage over the Puppy Coup. More often than not, the rage comes back to one single target: Vox Day. Most of the Sad Puppies are moderate liberals and moderate right-wingers. To them, the Sad Puppy slate is about restoring balance and neutrality to the Hugo Awards. But Vox Day’s Rabid Puppy slate is even more offensive and more enraging- because it means someone as brazenly, unabashedly anti-liberal as Vox Day can win an award. It means that Vox Day has power and influence. It’s him breaking a window and them being unable to punish him for it. The anti-Puppy old guard is screaming for blood, because they know how the slippery slope works. If Vox Day can participate in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, it means people like Vox Day who agree with Vox Day’s views are also welcome. It means that now, evil right-wing people like myself will start to participate in SFF.

That’s also why the leftist rage against #GamerGate has been so severe. Leftists hate #GamerGate because #GamerGate hurt leftists and continues to hurt them, and no one is getting punished for it. Nero is going to E3. Brandon and Liz now write for the Escapist. Jen Dawe and Rogue both got their games on steam, and TFYC is likely to follow. #GamerGate is not going away, #GamerGate is only becoming more visible and more culturally influential in gaming. #GamerGate has broken so many windows.

And ultimately, we need to break even more windows. We need to find more windows and break them. We need to flood the comments sections of anti-#GamerGate websites and make our presence known. We need to find a way around the block lists so we can make it very clear to the opposition that twitter is our territory. We need to spread our shit-talk of SJWs to the public sphere, and go public. Every time #GamerGate gets to transgress against the SJW norm without consequences, we make transgressing against them more acceptable.

One of my personal idols is weev. I get that it’s kind of weird for a gay sperg to like weev, but the man is simply brilliant. He once said to me that his goal was “to widen the overton window until genocide becomes acceptable”. In a sense, Encyclopedia Dramatica has done just that: it’s become the perfect tool to attack the SJW establishment without consequence. Someone on /r/GamerGhazi was chimping out quite hard because googling “Sarah Nyberg” brought up little Nicky’s page on ED. If anyone wants to look up nick Nyberg’s body of work, the first thing they see is that he’s a sexual deviant and complete waste of flesh. ED helps give a platform for otherwise unspeakable ideas and lets people find them, internalize them, and spread them. Part of what helps keep troll behavior alive is that ED can exist without repercussions. Weev is part of what was the most successful window-breaker in internet history.

And yes, I know weev doesn’t think too highly of #GamerGate. But that doesn’t make him any less brilliant. We need to take a page from his book and be more aggressive and transgressive. Every time we hurt SJWs and get away with it, we de-legitimatize them and make hurting SJWs more acceptable. Every time we take away a safe space, we assert that we’re the norm, not them. Every time an Ellen Pao or Sabrina Erdely gets publicly humiliated, they are forced back into the shadows. At this point the #GamerGate doctrine should be to attack, attack attack.

Think about it this way- the more people publicly shit on Gawker and Vox, the easier it will be to pull away their advertisers through our e-mailing. The more vocally people shit on Anita and friends, the harder it will be for the games press to ignore it or try to rebuke us. The more #GamerGate embeds itself into gaming culture, the harder it’ll be for games press and SJWs to take it over. We need to break all of the windows and graffiti all of the subway cars, and change things so #GamerGate is the norm.

The Hugo Awards, the “Puppy Coup” and #GamerGate

First off, I’d like to wish all my readers a very happy and blessed Easter. I was unfortunately forced to attend church by my parents: it’s not what you think, we’re Episcopalian and both our Interim Rector and Bishop are women. Hopefully all of you out there in the alt-right have better churches to visit. And for my Odinist readers, next time you want to torch a church, consider burning an Episcopal one if you can’t find any Unitarian Universalist ones.

Now then, let’s move on to the big story of the weekend: The Hugo Award nominations. Let’s start by looking over the nominees, shall we? I copy/pasted this from their website, with my own observations:

Thoughts on Altgames, #GamerGate, and the alt-right.

I’m about to do something that will be very, very shocking to my readers, especially the ones that know me: I’m going to endorse an idea of Zoe Quinn’s. Now don’t get me wrong, I still despise Zoe Quinn. She’s an abuser, an adulterer, a liar, and altogether and unpleasant person who doesn’t belong in gaming. But her recent post on the idea of “altgames” is 100% spot on. In it, Quinn describes Alt Games, a spinoff of indie games. Altgames could be defined as DIY games and games criticism made by amateur indie outsiders not as a commercial product to sell, but as a means of expression. In what I think is very spot-on, she compares it to punk rock.

I’ll admit, I’m not well-versed in punk. Most of the pretentious liberal bullshit doesn’t speak to me and makes me roll my eyes. But I do have a history with the genre. When I was an angry kid in my senior year of high school fighting mental illness, I found transgressive punk bands like Anal Cunt and GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. Those bands to me were punk: disaffected dudes who didn’t fit in with the world lashing out in frustration and discontent. It was the same thing that attracted me to black metal: a feeling of general discontent with the world. As I got into college, I forgot about punk. But when I dropped out and started working, I started listening to bands like Blood For Blood and Antiseen: artists who made music for low-class people talking about the lower-class lifestyle. I wasn’t from the white ghettos of Boston or the backwoods of South Carolina, but I was a working man trying to make my way in the world. I felt like an underdog, so I listened to underdog music. It’s helped me really find a sense of contentment with my existence as a prole. So while I’m not 100% punk, I get punk well enough to see what Quinn is going for here with altgames.

If we expand the definition of altgames to include games criticism, then I was altgames before altgames was even given a name. Make no mistake, as much as I’ll shill my gratipay, The Right Vidya (and now The Right Drama!) is a labor of love. It’s my desire to create games writing that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Putting up a new blog post is exhilarating. When Nick Land and Adrian Chmielarz shared my post on Hatred, my heart skipped a beat. To me, getting the attention of a blog like Xenosystems or a dev like Adrian Chmielarz was more valuable than any cash donation. I felt like what I was saying mattered and made a difference. I was helping introduce video games to the alt-right and the alt-right to video games. I was merging the two. I’d like to think that I still am, given how much traffic my posts on KotakuInAction get me.

This is why I’m throwing my support behind the idea of altgames. I get that a lot of people in the alt-right, especially neoreaction, look down on Rachel Haywire for her idea of a punk aesthetic for the right. For most of us, outside decadent skinheads, punk is seen as a degenerate liberal cesspit. I disagree. The key element to punk is that it’s subversive- a word that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past few weeks. As our alt-right critics will note, there’s a lot of LARPing going on in NRx: too many people talking about what the glorious neoreactionary future will look like and not enough people focusing on the here and now. What we should be doing is focusing on how we can subvert the Cathedral and undermine its reach. I think #GamerGate is a major breakthrough for us: we saw a bunch of young, unassuming enlightenment-friendly types openly challenge their progressive “betters” and manage to keep it going for over six, soon to be seven months so far. Part of the success of #GamerGate lies in the DIY culture that permeates it: you have tons of people making #GamerGate art, starting #GamerGate charity, hosting #GamerGate streams, and even making #GamerGate games. Hell, The Right Vidya was inspired by the DIY culture of #GamerGate. It’s their ability to produce content that has helped them keep going.

But we need to be better than that. What helped turn me on to the alternative right was the work of HP Lovecraft, telling the kind of stories about social decay that no one else told. It helped subvert what I was learning in high school at the time as I realized that Detroit and other urban centers confirmed the predictions in his work. It taught me to look outside the box and embrace esoteric political wisdom. Obviously it wasn’t the only factor: the transgressive punk and black metal that I mentioned before helped me really clarify my distaste for modernity. Neoreaction needs to get on that: we need more media out there that subverts the cathedral and undermines it. And that’s why we need to hop on the altgames train. We need to take advantage of a DIY-centric scene and use it as a means of subversion. Altgames are already pretty big, and they’re only going to get bigger. I think one of the smartest things the alt-right did was to embrace tech, because with the tech boom we grew and prospered. I think when it comes to altgames, this is a boom coming that we could use to our advantage.

As for my brothers and sisters in #GamerGate, the idea of altgames is important to us as well. We all know that the community in the game business is awful: the testimony of guys like Roguestar and the work of the ShortFatOtaku team tells us that much. It’s a closed little circlejerk of industry buddies all working to get each other over, even at the expense of everyone else. Altgames is about realizing that the circlejerk exists and using various platforms like itch.io, twine, Patreon and more to really help break it up. Imagine if the DIY spirit of #GamerGate met with the DIY attitude of altgames? We could build a new, better GDC, a better IGF and Indiecade. We could an alternative to the corrupt, broken industry and build a much better one. The nature of altgames is about trying to empower amateurs and beginners. It’s perfectly in touch with #SolutionSixMonths and #OpRebuild. It’s the perfect platform for #GamerGate to use to help expand our influence and get our message out. We are the real alternative, and we need to make ourselves known.

So in conclusion, I suppose you should think of this post as another call to action. It’s time we stop rolling our eyes at the DIY platforms and start using them to help build the newer, more improved gaming community, whatever that means to you. Now more than ever, it’s become easier to take control and choose where you want to guide a scene. This is perhaps the best chance you’ll get in a long time to make an impact. It’s time you take advantage of it.

Signaling and #GamerGate

I’m sure that my alt-right audience is already familiar with the concept of signaling. This is for the unenlightened members of #GamerGate who aren’t really familiar with the concept. This is a basic sort of glossary on social signaling, how it works, and how it effects #GamerGate. I expect to maybe expand on this in the future, when I get some free time.