I'm buggering off for a bit.
No, not to Resetera - that's a dumpster fire I don't need. Honestly I'm not sure where to, I'm a bit homeless right now, caught between the two sides of the culture war. I do have a few things to say before I depart, and no it's not going out in a blaze of glory or any of that kind of shit. I just want to say a few things, positive and negative, before I leave, then I'll leave people to post their abuse (if it doesn't feature the word cunt I'll be disappointed) and management will be more than welcome to ignore the lot.
The Ban
First up, I'll get my ban out of the way, then I can get to the more interesting/important bits. Now for the most part
Kadayi
has been a decent enough chap, but I consider his pearl-clutching somewhat disingenuous (
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/juli...-at-ecuadorean-embassy.1476140/post-253983776). So much outrage over the use of the word cunt because it might offend his female colleagues, and yet where is his objection to "tits look so good on the tv" or the ass thread or the hawt or not thread? What about "what tittylates you more? Sideboob or cameltoe?" thread, in which he posted? There is a lot of talk on these forums of 'the names' and the 'little helpers' from Resetera, but maybe GAF has its own little helper. Anyway, enough of that shit. To business.
The Forum
Some of you will have noticed of late that I am a little dissatisfied with some aspects of the forum. Grumpy even. Now, to be clear, there's a lot I like. I love that I can get into deep philosophical discussions, I love that I can discuss issues with conservatives and sometimes come to agreement somewhere in the middle between their position and my centre-left position. We have some really bright people here and their presence is wonderful. In gaming the backlog thread has changed my gaming life, by being there in the right place at the right time. I've discovered a love of Japanese games thanks to these forums. We can post pictures of attractive females and not be judged. I can be my true weird self, most of the time. There's much that is good. These are things that need to be kept.
Truthfully, RockPaperShotgun also has some very smart people on its forums, some centre-left people among all the hardcore nutters, and no doubt Ree has some capable people too (what I've seen leaves me with no desire to investigate in depth - wading through liquid shit to find a diamond is less fun than it sounds). Unfortunately RPS and GAF have the same problem, which is a small hard-core of extremists poisoning the well. On RPS it's the SJW activists (a bigger group there than our extremists admittedly) getting outraged at any minor slight and aggressively pursuing anyone guilty of wrong-think (and the big problem is that some of those are among the writing staff/freelancers). Here it's the guys posting anti-trans stuff constantly, the obsession with Islam, the other chap who has beef with black people and wants to compare their intelligence among other things - a short ban neutered him somewhat but he's still posting some pretty clear race-baiting stuff. In both cases there's a bit of snark that, by itself, one just dismisses and moves on. But I left RPS because it accumulated over time, while the majority of what was posted was inoffensive enough, once in a while they'd hit a "fucking white guys" moment, and these add up eventually to a point where after seeing it enough times you realise they really have a problem with white guys. In the end, I felt that I couldn't continue to post somewhere like that. The same thing is true here. A large majority of the content is very very good. However, a decent chunk of stuff gets posted, with little-to-no admin/staff pushback, that is highly unwelcoming to trans people, to muslims, to black people. I'm not any of those things but that doesn't mean that seeing those things doesn't make me feel that this place isn't for me. It chips away, each little niggle, until eventually it feels like coming here just isn't fun anymore. I'm at that same point here that I was with RPS, and once again I'm homeless, looking for a place on the net to call home, free of bigotry on all sides.
I get that the events that led to creation of Resetera were very traumatic, for
EviLore
and the staff, and for the forum members. I wasn't there so obviously I don't know it all but I've read bits and pieces and it seems it was a thoroughly shitty time. The natural reaction is to be the exact opposite, much like after a bad relationship we tend to make poor choices on the rebound. The trouble is that we run into the horseshoe theory. If you look at the composition of the forum, expressed at its wildest in the politics forum, there's a dearth of centre-left talent here (or perhaps that talent isn't posting in politics due to the nature of the threads posted - the political compass thread hints that this may be so). We have a decent number of centre-right, but really very little centre-left. We have some hard-left (but perhaps their hard-left positions here are a reaction to the perceived right-wing nature of the forum) but all they achieve is to reinforce people's belief that anyone on the left is a Ree nutjob. The challenge GAF faces is that the nature of posts is probably scaring off a decent number of centrists (both left and right) - certainly it's reached a point where it bothers me and I consider myself a member of the more rational left, focusing on class over imutable idpol characteristics.
It spills over into the gaming forum with endless discussion of SJWs, of which I'm as much to blame as anyone else. I understand that it's a hot-button topic due to their take-over of the gaming press, but the response to that is dependent on the goal. Are we looking to replace the SJWs in the gaming media with their right-wing equivalents? If so, the current approach is probably fair. If we are aiming to restore decency, the love of games, and that 90s anarchic anything-goes vibe that was simply about having fun, that understood its audience was probably mostly male and didn't complain about catering to that, without seeking to angrily drive out others, I think we need to move past that. The way to fix the SJW problem is not to create the anti-SJW, it is to create something the majority can gravitate towards. A games site posting in the manner of early RockPaperShotgun or peak PC Zone would be wonderful. I firmly believe that the creation of such would do a great deal to fix the problems in the gaming industry and return it to the hands of the enthusiasts, and allow us to present a united front against the true evils of the current gaming industry: creeping monetization, DRM that reduces your consumer rights and buggers up game preservation for future generations, corporate shilling, corrupt review practices, crunch, soulless corporations destroying talented studios, etc. These are the things that should be able to unite left and right, but we can only fight those causes by getting both sides in one place to talk it over and plan action. If we remain divided in this way, the bastards win.
So, I'm buggering off. No doubt I'll pop in to see if anything's got better in coming months but for now, assuming no improvement, I'm done (of course I might just get a permaban for being a cunt). Thank you for the good times, thank you for lighting my philosophical fires, thank you for making me see the value in Japanese games, thank you for making me push myself to learn to git gud on Dark Souls, thank you for the tits, the ass, the aussies and their cunts, thank you for the freedom to be a weird fucker. I wish you guys the best. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Over and out,
Hari the cunt
PS to save you guys a job:
PPS That bastard
Redneckerz
rather stole my thunder with his thread which discusses some similar concerns. What a cunt.
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