You go, girls
Grab some popcorn and pull up a seat for this one.
There’s been raging controversy lately about female gamers being harrassed or even threatened via in-game messages for daring to encroach on the online gaming boys’ club, to the point that you could do a Venn diagram heavily overlapping “macho” male gamers and frat-boy rape culture.
I’ll fess up to one thing: I don’t “do” online gaming myself. The last time I bothered was over ten years ago, but even then the number of guys on there trying to overcrank the macho bugged me – I’m a guy, and it took me right out of the game. These days, I don’t have time to devote to massive gaming sessions; if I’m going to be playing with someone who’s operating on the level of a child, I’m going to play some more Super Mario Wii with Little E.
The companies running the games and servers have remained deafeningly quiet on the issue. Of course they have: most of their audience is male. The last thing they want to be seen to do is let the terrorists, erm, sorry, “people who know that there’s a way you’re supposed to act toward everyone,” win. Never mind the fact that, had some of these in-game messages and harrassment been delivered via text message, phone call or e-mail, the sender would have the cops knocking on their door within a few hours.
I understand that the anonymity of the internet is a great playground for those who understand the basic rules. For too many others, though, it’s a perfect breeding ground for creepiness: people get away with saying things that they’d never get away with saying in person, most likely on pain of getting their asses kicked. I’m of A Certain Age, so I don’t really do the whole anonymity thing: if I tried to maintain a different person for every venue, I’d suffer catastrophic out-of-memory errors in record time. Too much of that real estate is taken up by more everyday concerns like “I need to fold clothes” or “I have books to write” or “Oh, I was supposed to clean litterboxes yesterday, wasn’t I?” I admire people who can “stay in character” until it becomes creepy and stalker-ish.
What the hilarious and yet deeply disturbing blog Fat, Ugly Or Slutty hopes to accomplish is to expose some of these demeaning communications, complete with the screen names of the senders. In places it’s funny. In places it makes me want to take a hot shower with lots of soap because it gives glimpses into a culture of guys who spend too much time playing games and not enough time accruing the kind of (occasionally bruising) life experience that tends to melt away the misguided prepubescent notions about women and sex to which these guys cling.
Question is… will the companies running the servers do anything about it, or are female gamers going to be told – again – to just “put up with it”? It’s bad enough that women are having to fight against ridiculously outmoded legislation – proposed almost entirely by men – involving reproductive health. Now the boys want to lock the ladies out of their secret clubhouse too?… Read more
Seems like it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was announcing Dalek Checkers would be played at my GlitchCon booth – oh wait, 
Because everything goes better with blaster beam. Well, maybe not everything. I’m not going to drop some beam on top of “Call Me Maybe” (though I’ve no doubt it would be an immense improvement). The song has to have a sound that lends itself to having this weird sound in the middle of it – there has to be a certain style of arrangement and, you know, it wouldn’t hurt if it fit thematically. 
A few weeks ago, La-La Land Records released a definitive, long-overdue 3-CD edition of the soundtrack of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and you better believe I snapped a copy of that mother up – it’s my #2 favorite soundtrack of all time (next only to The Empire Strikes Back). Near the end of the third disc is a track isolating the sound of the blaster beam from the rest of the orchestra. Anytime in the first Trek movie you hear something that sounds like a cross between an electric guitar and the gates of hell opening, that’s the beam, baby. … 
One of my beloved Samsung LCD monitors bit the dust today: dead lamp. This is the first dead lamp I’ve had in over 10 years of not doing CRTs (except as TVs that sit across the room – still haven’t made the leap to HD yet, despite the whole forced-obsolescence thing – my brother’s 23″ Zenith color TV that went to college with him and back is still working, thank you very much). This is a pain-in-the-butt loss because the Samsung screens had baseband (RCA) video and audio inputs as well as VGA – they were pretty dandy for hauling to OVGE and hooking old video games up to.
I’ve been talking for some time about tearing down my man-cave, only for a variety of reasons it hasn’t been happening as fast as I’d like. Today I emptied out, moved, and refilled one of the heaviest, most awkward pieces of furniture in my house, a 6+ foot tall bookshelf that my folks got for me, and my dad built for me, one Christmas in the ’80s. It matched a computer desk and printer table which are no longer with me. It’s still in one piece, reasonably attractive, and it’s damned solid. And yeah, the fact that I remember watching my dad build it while knocking back a beer and cursing a lot has something to do with it. I do the same thing with build-it-yourself furniture, minus the beer (though as I get older, and the printed instructions gradually become more incomprehensible, I have to admit that the temptation is sometimes there). … 
On Sunday, a couple dropped by to load up my dear old Kickman arcade machine to take it home. I have to admit I was being a bit of a “helicopter parent” to a machine that was no longer mine: I was practically grilling them about whether or not they had the necessary gear to load, secure and transport it home. “Do you have straps? Have you seen the clouds building overhead – do you have a tarp?” How they resisted the urge to tell me to shaddup and go inside, I have no idea. The point is: thanks to an inept employee of North American Van Lines, I never got to get the full enjoyment out of the machine, because he damaged it all but ramming it through the walls of my house when the machine was delivered to me years and years ago. The wording of my auction was pretty strict: don’t bother to bid on this unless you know the proper way to get it out of here. I’d rather keep the machine and not have the money than watch it get beaten up even more on the way out the door. … 
Last week, Little E decided that we needed to head to the grocery store, so I asked him to take some paper and make a list of things we needed to get. (This is a sneaky-daddy way of making him practice writing and spelling without it seeming like “schoolwork”.) The results were mostly legible, bearing in mind that the list was written on several pieces of unruled paper by a four-year-old. And for the most part, the list was surprisingly practical… mostly. … 