MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

@megaman8x:

No, no, no, that's the end of childhood, not the beginning of being an adult.

author=BowelMovement
I've had an epiphany that everyone else is having, growing up is just a buzzword, maturing? Buzzword. It's all namby-pamby horseshit that encourages kids to go with the corporate machine and be responsible and blarrr...

Being an existential thinker, I think the terms immature, mature, right, wrong, good, bad, evil whatever... are all buzzwords. They are invented by humans to criticize or aggrandize subjectively a topic or a target.

They hold no value in the vast scheme of the universe. The terms are very human ones.

@Max McGee: Fun fact, I do have a disease called Pan Hypo Pit, which ceases my production of testosterone, which in turn means puberty would never feasibly happen (it does but it's through supplements I take each day).

It's often called Peter Pan Syndrome. I literally am the closest thing one can be to Peter Pan, I just can't fly.

Wow, I had no idea that was a thing.

look at you folks, makin' games

good on ya!

author=Wetmat
Even 'cuz, for reasons and purposes, you're pretty much the reason i have been avoiding this thread, because i can't distinguish your discourse from people who would death threaten me, among other things, so i guess this says volumes about your contribution to the topic.

wowwwwwwwwwwww.

I haven't threatened you with death and wasn't planning on it. How is that in and of itself not an incredibly meaningful distinction? I don't think I should get a trophy for simply not being a malignantly awful person, but surely you must at least recognize the distinction.

author=wetmat
So, if you feel that a femhype article is comparable to a fox news article, you have place no here. You've missed the point, and you're not contributing to anything; only, mayhap, to the constrution of an unsafe place for people like me who want to be taken seriously, and feel secure while doing so.

I was staff on this forum practically since before you were born. Seriously I have been here since 2008. That's seven years now, and that's just RMN, not even gam mak in general. Speaking as a crotchety old person, if I don't belong here, I have no idea where I do belong. I think there's room here for everyone. But if anyone's gonna go, it sure as hell ain't me. I'm practically part of the architecture.

author=WetMattos
Take my advice. Grab your things, and retire yourself from this thread. It'll do both of us good.

no u :P

The truly ironic thing is that you and Max are basically two sides to the same depressingly droll coin.

Max has a history of showing up, derailing and shutting down discussions like these. From what I can tell, it gives him some false sense of superiority. There's no point in trying engage with him. You'd be better off arguing with a brick wall.

this is bullshit.

Of course F_G you may believe whatever you wish but as far as I'm concerned, attempting to engage the other side is the entire reason I'm here. I am asking the question "why does this matter?" and looking for any answer but "of course it does you Philistine stop silencing me!" or "read my gender studies curriculum!". You know, like, a meaningful answer.

Here's another way to look at it. I am here to challenge you. It's not vitriolic and it's not abusive. It is a challenge to your presumptions. It is a challenge to the unproven presumption that someone calling a fictional character on the internet a tranny actually matters or means something beyond itself.

Go play any first person shooter on xbox live and you will be, or so I'm told, assaulted with 14 year old rear births screaming 'nigger' and 'cocksucker' and 'bitch' and 'slut' and 'whore' and 'faggot' and 'kike' and so on and so forth. This does not point towards the fact that in the western world we live in a 'racist heterosexist capitalist patriarchy' or whatever. It points towards nothing but the undeniable truth of John Gabriel's greater internet fuckwad theory.



People are dicks, people are toxic, they always have been, they always will be, grow up, toughen up, and get over it. Now speaking from personal experience, not getting upset by toxic behavior can be really, really hard when that toxic behavior is directed at you personally. There is thread after thread after thread on this website where I personally lose my shit HARD in response to bullying and abuse.

But seeking offense from comments made about (fake) people who have a demographic variable or two in common with you? That's just asking for unnecessary pain.

This is not me shutting down the conversation, and I'm sick of that accusation. This is me participating in the conversation. The invitation I am giving is not one to shut the fuck up. The invitation I am giving is an invitation to endeavor to prove me wrong.

The current discourse on oppression understand that most of the violence happens in conceptual level,

Violence cannot happen on a conceptual level. That is not a real thing. You are misappropriating the concept of violence. You are perverting the definition of violence. There is no such thing as 'conceptual violence'. That is an academic construct created by the radical social justice left, not a real thing that mainstream scholars recognize as legitimate.

1)Max, please fuck off and try to be more productive (and positive). You have some shitty opinions, my friends have shitty opinions, and no one is going to convince the other to change their mind, so I suggest a bit of a paradigm change on how you go about these things. Oh, and some Robert Greene.

Shocking thought Zieg, telling someone to 'fuck off' isn't really very productive (or positive).

Also, my opinions are not shitty, they are great.

I apologize if people who genuinely wanted to participate felt I would jump on them for failure to properly kowtow to my expectations.

You don't get to decide whether my desire to participate is genuine, you know. If I wanted to not 'participate', I wouldn't post. I'm going to try to minimize my bickering with you because I don't want to derail the thread further, but I had to say that much.

Pink vs. Blue Et Al

AE, you fail to take into consideration that our ideals of right and wrong are skewed by the fact that we are nurtured to believe in the wrong rights and the right wrongs. It is a sad fact that most girls look into the mirror and see faults because that is what media teaches them to see. It teaches them that they have to look like x model in order to be considered pretty (never mind that the model in question doesn't look like she is represented).

It's the same skewing that happens when the girls' aisle in a toystore is filled with pink 'sexy' dolls and cuddly toys and the boys' is blue and full of trucks and sports equipment. And in the case that there is something sporty in the girls' section, it's pink and flowery, and in the case that there's a doll in the boys' section, it's got rippling muscles and guns and 'manly' things added.

It's thrown in our faces all through our lives until it becomes a habit to think 'pink is girl, blue is boy' and to shy away from association with the opposite. An example. I bought my niece an omni-gender clothing set - a well-made camo jacket, pants and tee-shirt. It was clearly not boys or girls wear - using dull reds and yellows in the design. It was cute as hell. My sister never let her wear it once. I got reamed out for buying her 'boy's clothes' and told my more than four people that I should have bought her a cute dress instead. I got the clothes so she could run around and get dirty without worrying about messing up the 'pretty' clothes she has.

The idea of male is this, female is that is so deeply ingrained in people that a 2 year old was not allowed to dress in certain clothes because people might think she was male. This is the pure and simple of it - people are influenced every day of their lives and it skews their ideals of right and wrong, good and bad, boy and girl, completely.

Fact.

In my opinion, a (convincing) argument has yet to be made that the mere existence of gender norms is harmful. Dogmatic adherence to gender norms under threat of physical/emotional violence? Yeah, that's bad. I am cautiously hopeful, guardedly optimistic, that at least in the relatively progressive Western World (TM), our generation is the last generation to grow up with that bullshit.

But that doesn't mean that normative gender roles themselves are harmful or toxic.

But stereotypical guy stuff and stereotypical girl stuff should totally be free to exist, and guys should be able to like "boy stuff" and girls to like "girlie stuff" without any fear of reprisals or being called some kind of gender traitor.

There has also been a tendency for the last few years for people to try shut down discussion about Social issues or their impact on the media(often by being snarky). You what? There are people who get hyperoffended. Do you know how many of them have been on this thread? 0. Zip zilch. Not even one.

If you can't see the perpetually offended outrage brigade's presence here, I think that you critically failed your Perception Test sir and/or madam.

***

hey can someone let mawk know that I have him on ignore. so he probably should not waste his time attacking me because i won't see it. for instance i wouldn't have known at all if not for BM quoting it with his masterfully jujitsu like riposte.

also maybe somebody could let him know that personal attacks aren't cool but nah? why would we want to enforce forum rules in a non-selective or fair way or anything. that would be crazy. only one side has to worry about their tone, after all.

Also yeah I support GamerGate, what of it. :D

Beyond that: I agree with pretty much everything that The Artist formerly known as BizarreMonkey said. Rock on. Sanity and reasonableness also came from SnowOwl and from Mog.

I am a staff member of this site, and while I am not a moderator, curating a non-hostile atmosphere is something I have taken fairly seriously ever since it became apparently a couple years ago that people were having problems here. Isn't it funny how nobody ever complains about it except you? If you feel my actions are unbecoming and inappropriate for a staff member of this site, you can lodge a complaint with the greater administration, but I assure you you won't win.

I strongly recommend you just stay away from this topic, Max. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Oh boy.

I am not complaining about curating a non-hostile atmosphere, because that is something I actually approve of (shit, where was any attempt to do that here a few years ago). What you are doing is entirely different. It is censorship which you are obviously a really big fan of. "You're not allowed to say 'tranny' because some people find it triggering." Give me a fucking break, dude. Those people need to take Stephen Fry's advice. I am increasingly of the blanket opinion (though obviously there are exceptions) that if you are being offensive, you are doing it right, and if you are being offended, you are doing it wrong.

I have no interest in lodging a complaint with the current administration, dude. I know which way the wind blows. I am talking directly to you. I am telling you that in short, you are a bad person in a position of (obviously quite trivial, but still demonstrable) power. The fact you are in a position of power is not a counterargument to the fact that you're a bad person, nor do your threats or the position you're in to silence, censure, or harm me change my feelings about your conduct one iota. I say this really only because of the 00.000001% (and I'm not sure I put enough zeros after the decimal place) chance that you might actually reflect upon your behavior and realize where you are in error. But I'm not holding my breath. Do whatever you've gotta do and call it whatever you want to pretend it is. After all, you will anyway.

http://femhype.com/2015/08/03/video-games-are-utterly-failing-trans-gamers-its-time-we-did-something-about-it/

Ok, WetMattos this article is kind of like...exactly what we're talking about. It's a "thinkpiece" that obviously comes from extreme radical crazytown. It's not mainstream, it's not impartial, and it's not academic. It's like the equivalent of quoting Fox News or Breitbart, only moreso, because those aren't extremist enough. Maybe The Daily Stormer? It's alarmist, sensational, seething with unjustified faux-outrage, and creating an entire mountain range out of an issue that is not even a molehill for the vast, vast, vast overwhelming majority of gamers (and, although I have no data on this, I would still bet money that it's not even an issue for the vast, vast, vast majority of trans gamers). Normal people, straight, gay or whatever, do not give a crap about this shit. SJWs aka the perpetually offended outrage brigade, are the only people who care or lend credence to these types of articles.

author=Feldschlacht IV
I'd like to point out (although as an aside and definitely not in reference to the original grievance of this topic) that the 'crazy SJW' is sort of a thing now and are capable of kind of concerning feats, up to most recently, a hardline feminist group trying to get Tyler the Creator (a rapper) banned from Australia and almost succeeding due to concerns of his lyrics, and so forth.

It's beginning to make the idea of the 'Horseshoe Theory' (the idea that far left and far right become more and more similar, in this case, the similarity of authoritarianism to 'banning' things they don't like) concerning them more and more credible, up to and including banning people from continents, hushing controversial discourse from colleges, and bullying, harassing, and even suing people.

The whole idea of 'shut up about crazy SJWs because we're not talking about those' is um...tenuous, depending on the conversation. The concept of 'crazy far leftists who are fucking shit up' isn't as far fetched anymore.

Just an aside!

Give this gentleman the thread-wide-rationality prize.

but what I don't understand is how can 'gamers' be a real and identifiable subgroup, but 'SJWs' not be? how can one set of broad generalized behaviours be categorized and the other not be? if people self-identify as being an SJW, doesn't that de facto make it a thing?

Sincerely,
Confused In Saskatchewan

They're both totally real subgroups, Kenton A. it's just that 'gamers' are actually a fairly diverse group of people that includes salt of the earth mensch-types like most people on this forum and repugnant filthmonsters, whereas avowed SJWs pretty much are made up entirely of repulsive filthmonsters.

It's kind of like saying "I don't understand how Italians can be a real and identifiable subgroup and Nazis* can't be". Obviously both are recognizable demographic groups. It's just that one of those groups are Nazis and deserve whatever they get for all the Nazi stuff they do. :D

(*Godwins every thread all day long.)

Once upon a time I used to laugh at the concept of 'PC Police' when it was something I associated with the Fox News crowd, then I read Solitayre's posts and realized he actually was literally and exactly that.

Mad <3s at Sated for dropping C-Bombs into this fucking delicate ass waltz of a thread. Reminds me of community organizer Saul Alinsky's "100 blacks" farting en masse at the symphony orchestra. (Count me as a continental US'er that gives as much or less of a shit about the word 'cunt' as anyone in Australia.)

Ok, now the moderately serious part of my post:

This is seriously the most heated argument between people who basically fundamentally agree with each other that I've ever seen. You shouldn't use transphobic slurs in a hateful way and you should include whatever types of characters in your game you damn well feel like, portrayed however you like because it's your game and fuck all the haters. Arguments about tone and conversation-accessibility set aside, does anyone actually disagree with any of these fundamental points? I'm not saying like "close the topic, plant dynamite at all the key structural points and go home" but you'd think at least things could be a bit less fraught!