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bessantj posted:It was the reason I asked here, I'd never heard of boundingintocomics before but after clicking round it seemed like a solid comicsgate platform so couldn't be trusted and I'd never heard of her before. Doesn't seem to have gone much further than that CG site and her facebook. Your instinct is correct, Bounding into Comics is a comicsgate platform with a history of treating marginalized comics creators very shoddily indeed.
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Oct 28, 2018 00:48
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Covok posted:It doesn't matter either way, really. Gamergate didn't "fail" though. It might not be as ominous and pervasive a presence as it used to be, but it's been less than half a year since Jessica Price lost her job because of their needling. It's still there, it's still agitating and harrassing even if it isn't as visible, and as the recent GoG thing demonstrates it's dogwhistles and tics still have an active demographic. It's really, really hard to put things like this back in their bottles once they're out, even if major figureheads drop out or lose interest-- I'm certain videogame culture on a whole will be dealing with the sour aftermath of gamergate for years.
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Oct 29, 2018 15:05
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Well, think fast true believers, because it turns out trusty Mark Xaid was really Magneto all along!!
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Nov 5, 2018 14:48
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Some very cursory poking around suggests that the actual term in this particular context originated in anime fan-communities in the late 80s ("ファンサービス") and took off in usenet circles by the mid-90s, but obviously gratuitous and pandering elements in art are nothing new and nothing unique to Japanese culture. I think that saying "fan service" as such is a problem with anime and manga isn't to say that Western comics and animation are off the hook in terms of leering sexism. Like, a Tijuana Bible isn't doujinshi and vice versa but they both emerge to meet parallel niches and have formal similarities.
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Nov 13, 2018 01:26
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Help her do what? You're making the absurd argument that all gratuitously titillating imagery across the entire global history of visual media is equivalent. I think I get what you're saying-- that Western comics fans don't have a lot of moral highground, all things considered, to go around turning their noses up at Japanese media-- and I think it's a point that is well worth making, but you're just incorrect in the finer details. "Fan service" is absolutely a phrase that emerges from and denotes a feature peculiar to manga and anime, and while it did penetrate into US fan discourses throughout the 90s, it for sure 100% has a material history rooted in a specific time and place. While the term describes a bunch of features (some of them, like loving, langorous shots of robots and weapons and stuff, innocuous is tedious), many of which have strong parallels in Western comics and animation (like the tendency to prioritize the adolescent male gaze), it's absolutely a piece of specialized jargon within anime and manga, with a more formalized position within those discourses-- I don't know the dragon thing site mentioned but even in the mid/late 90s Evangelion's next-episode teasers were absolutely saturated with winking invocations of the term. Also-- and I'll be pedantic because this, well, in for a penny in for a pound-- saying that 90% of US comics fans in the 90s were unfamiliar with anime is bonkers. Mainstream distribution exploded later in the decade but within nerd circles there was a very brisk trades in licensed as well as bootleg materials since the 80s. And the fetishistic gaze in Western comics pre-dates the 1960s by decades, going at least as far back as Tijuana Bibles and stuff like Norman Pett's Jane in the 1930s.
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Nov 13, 2018 02:27
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FMguru posted:According to https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cheesecake?s=t?s=t it was the 1930s. Sexy pinup images have been called "cheesecake" for a long long while. There are even older (17th century) references to "cheesecake" as a punning synonym for a "tart" in the sexual sense, which maybe informs the stricter usage we're talking about here, or, you know, could just as easily be coincidence.
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Nov 13, 2018 05:48
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I don't know why you came in here to post a twitter thread where you call us a "smug little clique," and also, come on, "Bitch Tits?" Grow up.
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Nov 13, 2018 19:02
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Skwirl posted:It's almost exactly a month since the last time, to the hour. I don't know if taking the time-change into account makes it precisely to the hour, or makes it an hour further off. site posted:you know, it's amazing that ive never heard of that guy spoken about by anyone, in any capacity, anywhere, ever, because reading that thread it sounds like he's singlehandly responsible for bringing down comicsgate His comic Weapon Brown had fans around here a few years ago IIRC. I think it's the same guy? From what I remember of the art that got posted periodically it looks like the same style.
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Nov 13, 2018 20:19
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I really, desperately hope that "trap" is the next atrocious nerd-culture term that gets rightly recognized as enormously lovely. Well, I mean, that's selfish, objectively if either that or the "reee" thing died first I'd be happy either way. Edit: I hope that doesn't read as a call-out of Covok in particular. I'm sorry that you ran into that kind of shittiness in what should have been a much better space.
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Nov 14, 2018 01:44
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Covok posted:Not at all. I wasn't approving of the term. I was putting it in quote fingers because I didn't want it to be thought of to be my own words. I don't approve of the term either. Yeah, that's exactly how I read it, it was my own post that I thought was unclear. Coolness Averted posted:trap does seem to be dying out or at least is getting called out in the anime circles by folks who I know who still do cosplay, I mean you still see it among edgelords, but general community seems to be better about it or maybe it's just the folks I know aren't teenagers anymore and are the adults running things or doing fabrication. I mostly run into it now in MMORPGs, where since there's an independent usage of the actual word (a "trap party" is a party that misrepresents how prepared or capable it is-- ie. capable players are lured into a "trap" by bad players inflating their abilities) lovely people can get away with using the transphobic meaning more easily since it flies under the radar.
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Nov 14, 2018 05:07
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Captain Rufus posted:He is no rightie by any measure outside of hard left loonie circlejerks like SA seems to be turning into. By "normal" US standards he is closer to a leftist boogeyman out to take your guns and let the browns in the nation to have gay anchor babies. (In reality he is a stereotypical liberal elitist more or less. Just one that will actually listen to other viewpoints outside of some of his stupid hang ups. And Trump tried or actually did sue him for mean words. Maher also gave a ton of money to the Obama campaign making him more politically effective than this entire forum more or less. How good that was given why the Orange Idiot is rumored to have run and if we want to count whatever 4chan did as political change through SA is a whole other thing.) I don't know what kind of response you expect to this kind of thing, but perhaps you should reflect on every other time you've come into this thread and its predecessor, and why it plays out the same way each time.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:52
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Dreqqus posted:This is what I believe now. Here's a somewhat happy derail, but this is essentially the "archeus" theory of 17th century "chemical physician" George Thomson. Was he correct? Lord no, but he was an important intermediate step in getting medicine out from the shadow of Galenic theory. You can read all about it in his 1666 book, Loimotomia, or, the Pest Anatomized. Captain Rufus posted:Im not spinning it. The dude has some stupid rear end viewpoints just like we all do. (Except he has more money than us because TV show and can blab em on the air. He does get booed sometimes and acts butthurt about it.) I'm not even saying his opinions are legit or that I agree with them. I find a lot of them dumb just like the dude from Loveline and the Man Show. But I listen to the podcast version of the show. And by non current SA standards the dude is still a boogeyman of the Right to the point that insane bomb maker had Maher on his list. (At least he claimed as such.) You seem to be having some difficulties figuring out why you're experiencing some pushback or resistance from this thread and I want you to read your posts carefully-- like, not for what you intended or what you "meant" to say, but for what you actually wrote, a close reading. And if this strikes you as an exercise in pointing out microaggressions or whatever, well, it is an exercise in pointing out microaggressions, because you're essentially tracking mud through a thread and instead of taking your shoes off and leaving them in the doorway you're rolling your eyes and defending mud. Many people in this thread, especially many of the more vocal and active people, are actually in marginalized groups that either face harm from right wing groups, or have historically been wedged out from full participation in various parts of the cultural industry by prejudice. So for us, it's not really enough to be like, well, we all hate the same comicsgate guys, although that's a start-- mutual oppostion isn't the same thing as solidarity. What this means is that when you vocally align yourself with the "middle," and take pains to distance yourself from both the far right and the "loony college tumblr SJW left" or whatever, it's sending a hostile signal, because to, say, a trans person, you never know if when somebody says "leftism run amok" they mean "you shouldn't be allowed to exist." It's very vague signaling that many people on the left and many marginalized people have learned from hard experience to read as a warning sign-- maybe when you say "VERY hard left" you mean, like, the Baader Meinhof Group but surely you can see that in 2018's cultural climate "VERY hard left" can also mean "doesn't want the planet to stew in its own juices, wants to unionize, and would rather not die of a preventable condition out of economic duress." That's why 1) it's important (and healthy, actually really validating) to actually state what your political positions are if you're trying to jump into a conversation about politics, and 2) people are hyper-vigilant about scoping out glues when somebody does stake an avowedly "centrist" stance like the one you take in these threads. You seem like someone who grew up in a different era of online discourse. I believe you mentioned in the last thread being taken aback when you were told not to say "sperg" anymore and acting similarly off-guard when told that "SJW" is a right-wing dogwhistle. Maybe when you started in on the internet, and the places where you used to go for online discourse, there were rougher, more laissez faire rules about what to say and what not to say. You were also probably posting largely in a sea of straight white guys who had no skin in the game if you said "retard" every five sentences. But that isn't the internet now. If you look closely at the language of your posts in this thread, you'll see lots of remnents of this earlier style of internet rhetoric, when the presumed speaker was a straight male, and when, tacitly, a good way to score points on someone was to imply their proximity to "bad" things like femininity and queerness. So even if you have totally good intentions, this is not the time in history nor probably the space on SA to talk about smacking people with dildos, wishing them to eat a bag of dicks, railing at "snowflakes" and people being pussies, rolling your eyes at "snooty books," and so on. It doesn't play well. Referring to Bill Maher and The Man Show as cultural touchstones-- it doesn't play well because, well, those shows are profoundly alienating and offer nothing to people outside of a narrow demographic that used to monopolize mass media and is gradually starting to not do so. When you say SomethingAwful on the whole is tending towards the hard left I'm curious what you really mean and perhaps that isn't something you've really unpacked for yourself either, because I don't see SA as being far left at all so much as gently and incrementally encouraging people to not loving talk like Maddox in 2018. You seem to be hung up on-- and perhaps for good reason-- the fact that despite you disliking many of the same people that this thread dislikes, you still get yelled at and made fun of whenever you come in here. That's a fair question and I hope I've addressed it in a fair way. I think it's mostly a matter of discourse, and a matter of positioning yourself as a subject. When people call you a "liberal" as "a slur" in real life, maybe the fact that you're amused by it and not curious about why that happened is indicative of the luxury of distance, something you definitely seem to be afforded. For a lot of people, liberal is a negative term, because it means somebody who wants to essentially talk the talk of progressivism and putting up a facile fuss against reaction, without actually giving a poo poo about class, gender, race, power, desire etc. that is to say without truly giving a poo poo about the nexus of tensions and exchanges that meaningfully constitute the category of politics. You're dealing with people from very different subject positions from yours, who have very different stakes in the issues of ComicsGate and the cultural resurgance of the right in general, and could just be significantly more mindful of respecting that those stakes are real even if you don't experience them. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 17:39
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edit: double post, sorry
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Nov 19, 2018 18:07
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Gynovore posted:Lefties think that everyone who doesn't agree with them is far right, and vice versa. This is nonsense. Captain Rufus posted:Some people can, will, and DO get pushed away by people trying too hard and others get disillusioned when their straight and narrow world views reinforced in tiny groups don't match reality. And I don't want to see overall GOOD messages ruined by that. I know SA has this whole burning hate on for TRUTH IN THE MIDDLE or Centrism but things aren't entirely black and white ya know? It however might just be a monochrome canvas with a couple specks of dust in a corner... You're still being tremendously unclear on what's "annoyingly hard left," and given what I know about RPGnet's editorial and moderating polices I suspect I'm not going to be all that sympathetic if you do decide to spell it out. What you seem to be agitating for is a version of politeness/civility that reduces to "being nice to you, not challenging you." You ask "What the hell do we DO about [systemic oppression in the US]" and suggest that "yelling at each other [...] or self congratulatory echo chambers isn't changing anyone's mind." Well, without a coherent position and at least the rudimentary building blocks of a praxis, the answer is "nothing," and if your investment in politics is sitting on the sidelines and having a laugh at atavistic conservative dinosaurs you aren't really helping, you're just rubbing balm on your own wounds, which is fine in moderation, but is not in the final accounting a politics. Not to toot my own horn, but to answer your rhetorical question, what I do is make sure that classes I teach are grounded to the extent that it makes sense in questions of social justice and liberation, I make sure that with each syllabus I get better at modeling representation, I reach out to colleagues from other subject positions for help not putting my foot in my mouth, and although this is somewhat risky in a large institution I commit myself to not passing myself as an apolitical educator, but foreground that a lot of these issues are profoundly personal to me. I don't believe that people are ineluctably good or bad (well, this is rhetorical filigree, I do think that people are fundamentally good, but that's not relevent here), and for sure I get many students who come straight from highschool fairly bright but largely educated by their own online meanderings, who in good faith have absorbed stuff like Jordan Peterson and some of the gently bobbing lures of the alt-right. Of course I don't just write them off as nazis, and of course it isn't my professional obligation, nor is it entirely ethically sound, for me to make it a personal mission to re-educate them. But I can't create a discursive space that's legitimatly conducive to changing anyone's minds unless I'm vocal and outspoken about my own convictions. If I have, say, on average 2-3 proto-Petersonite kids at the beginning of each class, I feel confident that at the end I have fewer, and it isn't because I coddle their misconceptions. Meeting someone where they are isn't the same as accepting that where they are is correct. You keep parroting that "the truth is somewhere in the middle" line but I don't think that that epistemological model is at all useful. I, like almost everyone else, know precisely where and what my truth is, and if the middle is a compromise between my own right to self-determination and safety and people who want to shove me onto the trolley tracks, then gently caress the middle. gently caress limited suffrage. gently caress 1840s and 1850s theorizing about an ethical, ameliorated slavery. gently caress phrenology, gently caress antebellum race theory and the white man's burden. gently caress "don't ask, don't tell." gently caress abstinence only education, and redlining, and every other attempt to mask the continued existence oppression and inequality as "baby steps." The truth is the truth and people can cavil all day and all night-- often productively!-- about what the truth is, but if centrism is asking me to shake hands "in the middle" with a neo-fascist with a knife in their other hand, I'm not going to. What else do I do that isn't just internet grandstanding, which I'm going to go into at the risk of self-lionizing because it annoys me immensely when centrists act like everyone who gives a poo poo about progressive issues online is de facto just a keyboard warrior--? I go to protests, I go to rallies, I coordinate between different groups who might be able to work together in solidarity (a few years ago we had a bunch of really fantastic joint actions between our city's Adjuncts Union and a group advocating for higher wages and safer working conditions for fast food workers). I bring this up primarily because I think if you actually attend or even pay attention to these events you'll see how untrue this idea of anger and passion scaring people towards the right is. Do you remember how awful and horrific the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" was? Seas of hateful faces with torches and leers? Note that we haven't seen a second far-right rally on that scale-- why? Because time after time they're outnumbered and outmatched by counter-protestors, and they know that their message can't compete with ours. In Philadelphia this weekend probably close to a hundred socialists, anarchists, activists and students from all across the big tent spectrum of left ideology came together to counter-protest what turned out to be an anemic little knot of less than 20 proud boys, grampas, and confused libertarians. Civil centrism gets Steve Bannon invited to the New Yorker Festival. Conviction and the courage to articulate it gets nazis too terrified to creep away from Gab and into the sun. I know which tactic I'll choose. (and as a corollary to this, consider how few open racists and fascists SA has compared to reddit or the various /chans. This isn't a fluke-- it's because they aren't welcome here and we aren't afraid to demonstrate it. See also really interesting work on how punk venues crack down on nazi infiltration-- it's by, more or less, aggressive no-platforming) Look, time and time again, positions that we now take for granted (abolition, Civil Rights, suffrage, gay lib, ACT UP, #metoo, birth control and marriage reform activism, right on down to the Levellers, gently caress, right on down to the wave of peasant revolts in 14th/15th c. Europe) are only accomplished by people who look like indecorous fanatics to the center. Seneca Falls was a wonderful convention and a lot got done at it, but ultimately women wouldn't be voting today if UK feminists weren't chucking bricks and firebombs and being rude and rowdy as poo poo. John Lewis advocated nonviolence but he didn't advocate inaction-- he didn't hesitate to get directly up in the face of white supremacy, and he certainly didn't make moderate sops to it. In mainstream narratives of 20th century queer liberation, the most visible organ of change is the riot, for god's sakes, and this is because a riot says more and does more than 80 seasons of Will & Grace will ever do. Positions like the one you seem to be circling around-- and which is the tacit position of most establishment Dems and almost all "Never Trump" Republicans-- is that outside of aberrant and exceptional circumstances (like this presidency) society is built on solid scaffolding and everything is fine-- history is over, as Fukuyama so embarrassingly said at the end of the Cold War. Think of those cringe-inducing Daily Show rallies in the late aughts. But things aren't fine, and they never have been, and they never will be if people don't take active, sometimes obnoxious steps to fix them. And if someone is going to be pushed away or alienated by marginalized groups agitating for respect and safety, then gently caress them I guess? edit: It's literally trans day of remembrance today-- 23 trans people in the US alone were murdered in the past year, at least, on top of countless assaults, suicides, and crimes that aren't recorded. The poet and essaying Claudia Rankine ended her 2014 book Citizen with a dedication page to young black men shot by police. With each successive printing that list was longer. IIRC newer editions leave a blank page, because it will be filled. Sometimes I think that the adage "if you aren't helping, you're harming" is a little much-- people do what they can. Small gestures. But for real-- if your contribution is to tell the people who ARE helping, even if they're helping primarily with their voices and their words, that they need to shut up and be polite, then what the gently caress are you trying to accomplish. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 20:37
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Send him back in time to the 18th century so he can whine about how this newfangled "novel" is turning women into masturbators and healthy young German lads into suicidal serial killers.
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Nov 22, 2018 01:48
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Samovar posted:Same position as Socrates! Who we only know ever 'existed' because Plato wrote about him. To be fair, we actually have quite a few sources on Socrates outside of Plato and independent(ish) of Plato. Xenophon is the big one as well as other students of his, Aristippus, Antisthenes, some others I forget. There's also his star cameo in Aristophanes' The Clouds!
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Nov 22, 2018 08:19
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CynicalThundercunt posted:Now hold on there, what the gently caress? I vehemently disagree with Bill Maher and I honestly feel like punching him in the nuts every time I hear about him (but would never), but no beliefs should be able to "disqualify" anyone from starting any conversation or saying anything. That's hosed up and slowly drifting into fascist territory if we're "disqualifying" people from having a voice because they disagree with us. Please clarify why the antivaxxer thing is any worse than the explicit bigotry. Or why you feel compelled to draw the particular line you're drawing, particularly where you're drawing it.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:41
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Covok posted:A sad reality is truth does NOT win out. It will ALWAYS lose to a comforting lie. This is how we got anti-vaxxing as a movement, the entire American government denying the ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC FACT of climate change, and Donald Trump as President. I may be more idealistic than a lot of people in similar circles, but I don't know. Anti-vaxxers are a fringe group for a reason-- it's because most people, even if they only vaguely understand how vaccination works (a boat I'm in!) accept that it works for numerous low-key empirical reasons. Trump, I reassure myself every day, lost the popular vote, badly. He doesn't speak for everyone, or even mostly everyone. I think people can learn and change. I think people will tend towards their best selves if conditions allow it and they're placed amongst healthy and supportive structures. I think that on a whole people are kinder and smarter than they were 30 years ago in large part because the internet allows people much broader access to people from different backgrounds, with different life experiences. What consoles me is that the totally berserk fringes of reactionary thought-- Proud Boys, MRAs, *gaters, etc.-- are a) widely recognized as both dangerous and laughable, vile shitheads all around b) fundamentally articulating positions that a few decades would have been MUCH more broadly mainstream, especially concerning "proper" gender and race roles. A large part of their violence is just a dying ideological body thrashing around in its death spasms, and as urgent as the need to proactively and assertively resist such ideologies is, it's also important to note for our own collective sanity that mass culture, as traumatically imperfect as it is, has taken already taken huge strides forward. If you remember what comic book forums, for example, were like 10-15 years ago, it would be impossible to imagine a thread like this having the general consensus that it does. I think that's progress, minor and incremental as it is, and a tiny, tiny but personally significant sign that often when confronted with a challenging truth or a comforting lie, people can and will choose truth. That being said, Bill Maher should be cold-cocked in the street for so much as opening his mouth to order a Jamba Juice. He's never said a worth worth saying or hearing. gently caress him and gently caress his unearned and pathetically utilized platform.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:59
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CynicalThundercunt posted:I draw a line at anti-vaxxing because it's advocating for the death of children, explicitly, and the death of other children, not only yours. There's a line between being a total dumbass and having blood on your hands. Anti-vaccination rhetoric inarguably kills children needlessly and selfishly, but if you think that racism, sexism and homophobia don't have just as much blood on their hands, if not oceans more, you're being super naive.
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Nov 24, 2018 03:08
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CynicalThundercunt posted:a racist rear end in a top hat saying "yeah man gently caress the blacks amiright" isn't killing anyone If this isn't disingenuous, it's like, Kaspar Houser levels of oblivious to the world of things and events. CynicalThundercunt posted:Racism/bigotry have blood on their hands as movements, but I doubt that some irrelevant comedian being a racist rear end in a top hat is really killing anyone, and I don't think some irrelevant comedian advocating war is really a factor in starting wars. Wars don't happen because armies spontaneously decide to huddle up and start fighting. In the 20th and 21st century in countries like the US they live or die off of popular mandate. Not unanimous mandate, of course, but enough. That mandate-- the belief that even if ugly or unpleasant a war is worth entering and worth remaining in-- is absolutely predicated on media messaging. In the early 2000s the war in the Middle East was absolutely and relentlessly marketed by news, pop culture, pedagogy, everything, and to say that "some irrelevant comedian" isn't, well, relevant, is staggering in the context of what the war drums during that period were like. quote:I see issues like racism as a spectrum, not a black and white (no pun intended) view of "racist" and "not racist", and there's a big difference between genuine advocacy for nailing black people to crosses and lighting them on fire and making casual hosed up comments. Why? What's the difference? Again, I think education and change is possible for almost everyone, but why should any kind of racism be hand-waved away as inconsequential? How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Nov 24, 2018 |
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Nov 24, 2018 03:23
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CynicalThundercunt posted:I mean, I've never really taken the time to think about how ironic comments could turn into a desire to shoot up a synagogue, I can't even fathom what it would be like to be susceptible to that kind of poo poo and I'd prefer to believe that human beings can not be that loving retarded that it comes from a few dumb comments, but if that's really how it is, I'm ready to reconsider my stances completely. I'm just not sure that extreme of a jump from dumb comments is what happens, it's not like someone hears some rear end in a top hat say something edgy and goes "Yeah man I want to go to a Nazi meetup!", is it? There is heaps of research on this, much of it very recent and very timely. This primer by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization which studies and works against violent extremism, is a good starting place if you're seriously unfamiliar with this phenomenon: https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right The ADL is also quite active in tracking this kind of activity. Here's an interesting paper they published recently about how online misogyny (incels, MRAs, etc.) is used by people further on the right as a breeding ground for more violent extremism: https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/when-women-are-the-enemy-the-intersection-of-misogyny-and-white-supremacy The late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke wrote some of the strongest scholarship of earlier eras of tangential discursive circles as pipelines to fascism. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity is his strongest work and, incidentally, a mere $1.99 on Kindle today. Michael Barkun, a prof of political philosophy at Syracuse, did similar work starting with far right Christian identitarianism as its main focus. Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America is as timely now as it was in 2003. Umberto Eco is frequently cited and a little glib but noone has written more lucidly about how fascism in Italy was imbricatedin the fabric of every social and cultural interaction. Other journalists and researchers working in this field include Emily Gorcenski, Mark Pitcavage, and Michael E. Hayden, among others, who frequently post rich stuff on twitter and elsewhere. This is largely stuff that's very visible in pretty mainstream news outlets-- who do you think is encouraging and indoctrinating all of the alt-right or incel shooters? Why do you think people are always talking about Gab, a dying and clunky social media platform? They're not just waking up in the morning and deciding that killing a church full of black people will solve the world's problems, they're being coached and coaxed into these beliefs, and the first step in this process is, yes, very very often irreverent and "edgy" humor. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Nov 24, 2018 |
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Nov 24, 2018 03:49
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Who is Dare and if that was a Death Ray chessmaster scheme what on earth was the point. I don't mind explaining the same thing to people ad nauseum, even if I suspect I'm rising to somebody's bait, because whatever, I'm used to it, but on his end, like, he wasn't even stirring the pot in a provocative way, he was just doing the same dance steps we've all surely seen a thousand times across the internet. Like, why bother.
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Nov 24, 2018 07:19
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I don't know a ton about anime so I'd be legitimately fascinated to read a popular or academic overview of GLBTQ+ representation in that and manga. Trans stuff in particular, it seems like there's a willingness to play around with cross-dressing and with magical or supernatural transformation, but not a lot exploring transness as a social and political identity, that is, more of an interest in playing around with gender tropes in the circumscribed space of the art rather than really digging into it as a cultural thing that fits uneasily in with conservative sexual and gender mores. I'm thinking of Makoto from Dead Dead Demons, or the really pretty shockingly offensive trans-woman in Golden Kamuy, the very dated and cringey character in Cowboy Bebop or the handful of trans characters in My Hero Academia who are generally innocuous but have pretty goofy character designs. As well as the long history of depicting drag queens/okama as burly, stubbly brutes, even when they're largely sympathetic (as in One Piece). I wonder if some of it is just not having the same taxonomical lines drawn as we do, and hence there being sort of a category crisis in trying to translate subject positions 1:1 either way. Sort of how in early modern England "mollies" were a distinct, crisply delineated demographic group, but to a contemporary reader it's impossible to tell in a given case, without further context, whether someone described as a molly is a gay young man, a transwoman, a cross-dressing sex worker or a male sex worker in general, a chaser, a hermaphroditic or intersex person, just sort of an effete or pretty looking working class boy, etc., because in that place and in that moment one umbrella term sufficed for all of those things and it didn't present definitional challenges. I'm just talking out of my rear end-- I really don't have any idea!
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Nov 26, 2018 16:21
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I picked up The Bride Was a Boy from there just now and its really endearing!
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Nov 27, 2018 02:08
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I'm sure the comics he writes are just lovely.
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Nov 30, 2018 21:47
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I believe she was also recently doxxed and had some gg creep tweeting about hanging around businesses and restaurants near her home.
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Dec 3, 2018 23:18
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Wanderer posted:I wonder at what point EVS will achieve a critical mass where he's more known and remembered for showing his rear end on Twitter over his political stances than he is for his X-Men or Green Lantern runs. I think he's been there for years. His New X-Men stuff was, I believe, over 15 years ago at this point. It looks like otherwise his last semi-regular work at Marvel was in 2002. He was working on Green Lantern and Green Lantern-adjacent titles up through this year but that franchise isn't the juggernaut it briefly was when Geoff Johns was really giving it his all. His other DC stuff in the past couple years seems to be sporadic fill-ins and one-shots. I mean really it's not like he left much of a reputation to trash. If he wasn't a colossal cretin I don't think anybody would be thinking about him anymore period.
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Dec 7, 2018 22:23
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Yeah, in general mainstream comics in the late 90s and early 2000s still had a prurient, frat-boy attitude towards sexuality that was both juvenile and also very blithely misogynistic. wizard magazine with it's endless lists of Top 10 X-Men Babes and leering comments about various Top Cow and wildstorm heroines was absolutely par for the course and the general vibe of editorial commentary tended towards similar knowing winks and shoulder nudges-- even generally well-constructed and compelling comics like Ultimate Spider-Man were, as you mention, not free from this. It's certainly something that's often shocking in going back to revisit stuff from as recent as 10-15 years ago but it's also encouraging to think about how that kind of poo poo is so self-evidently gross to so many people now instead of either encouraged or begrudgingly tolerated.
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Dec 30, 2018 05:13
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I saw that last night and was unsure whether or not it was worth posting here. It's such bog-standard white middle-class oblivious entitlement, and her dopiness on gender is 100% unsurprising given what a mess Maneaters is.
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Jan 6, 2019 22:14
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Lurdiak posted:Oh no, someone targeted by comicsgate is kind of lovely. I guess we were the real racists the whole time. I have no idea what this is in response too, I don't think anyone in this thread was at all suggesting that comicsgate was right about, um, anything ever.
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Jan 6, 2019 23:49
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Retro Futurist posted:What exactly did Cain do that was transphobic? All I can find is people calling her that for not including a trans character in Maneaters 1) Maneaters has a premise that potentially inflects interesting on trans-femininity but instead chooses to act like trans women don't exist-- it's position equates "menstruating" and "being a woman" as taxonomically identical which is, hm, not satisfying. There's also a bit of world building about lacing all the water supply with estrogen which, again, raises potentially interesting world-building questions but is instead ignored. Essentially, it's a two-fold issue, and one which was understated enough that a lot of people were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt: a) she treats womanhood as entirely biologically determined, which, fine, I don't like it obviously but sometimes allegory is broad and stupid, b) she actively forecloses elements of the setting that invite or even demand a bit of thought, care, and finesse about transness. Basically she's ostensibly writing a book about being a woman, but is actually writing about a specific variety of gendered experience/ 2) The tweet which kicked off the current hubbub-- the one about pronouns, not the one about spirit animals, which is imo worse really-- takes on an influential but mistaken reading of Judith Butler, which presumes to celebrate a fluidity and plasticity of gender-as-performance but actually trivializes the experience of trans, NB, intersex, or other gender non-conforming people for whom choosing a pronoun is not necessarily or exclusively a ludic, fun, or political gesture, but an actual articulation of identity. It's like-- and this is reductive and probably unfair-- the difference between someone saying that race and racial difference is largely socially constructed, and someone saying "ergo I should be able to wear a head-dress on Halloween." It's adopting something of deep and often traumatic import to many vulnerable and marginalized people and treating it like a bumper sticker or enamel pin. It's not evil, per se, and again, it's a very common misreading of a very influential book, but it's tacky, and it's a worrying point in one of the most well-trod slippery slopes down into TERFdom. I hope none of this came off as condescendingly or overly-explainy-- it's finnicky, semantic, and even as a super over-sensitive trans-woman I hesitated a minute before deciding that, yeah, I was actually pretty fed up with her over it. That's the broad strokes of it though-- she positions herself as a left-wing feminist ally but is really just sort of curating a pretty cushy position of wealthy white normativity. It's less that she's saying egregiously hateful things and more that she's showing a pattern of not caring enough to learn, or to apologize for when she messes up. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 00:29
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Edge & Christian posted:No problem. I'm not questioning its existence, I just like to have resources on hand for when someone goes "what's the big deal?" and in this case those proved weirdly difficult to find. I think it's a good question and to answer your initial formulation of it, honestly I don't know why I reacted more viscerally to that tweet. I guess on the most basic level it was primarily her response to being called out-- if she hadn't doubled down seemingly out of nothing but snide defensiveness I wouldn't have even really registered it as anything more than a certain je ne sais basic, but I think that her reaction to being lightly challenged was to strike a weird nyah nyah pose at the person critiquing her is telling. I mean, conditions being what they are, I imagine Cain must have had to have developed a pretty prickly hide and not much of an inclination to giving anonymous critics the benefit of the doubt, but as you mentioned, it would have cost her nothing to just say, like, oops, sorry, I didn't realize it would bother anyone. As for spirit animal stuff in particular-- to be frank once I sat down to think about it I realized I don't actually know a lot about it, and mainly have just agreed to not use it having been told not to use it. Offline I mostly see this critique levied by Native American/First Nations student groups, not so much from neopagans or whatever, although online, who knows, I'm sure I first ran into it on Tumblr eight years ago and just internalized it. I'm also having some trouble turning up solid-looking, academically vetted citations on this issue, but it might be the all-too common issue of academia lagging behind groundswell consensus on a social issue. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 06:49
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In related news, Mike Miller threw a fit and threatened to dox somebody asking him for a refund on a late book:
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Jan 7, 2019 16:49
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Usually if I dislike something I don't buy like eighteen of it but hey.
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Jan 31, 2019 00:53
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Madkal posted:Not Gaiman himself but I know a few authors that get paid more money on the talking/class circuit than through book sales so I don't really see a problem with Gaiman doing it. If people can't afford to go to his classes that isn't his fault, and if they want to use a GoFundMe or whatnot to attend his classes, again this shouldn't be his problem either. If he decides to signal boost it thinking it might help the people raise the funds, than whatever, but expecting him to take a pay cut or whatnot because some people can't afford taking his class isn't really feasible. That's 99% of all authors, I'd guess, especially as you move away from commercial genres and screenwriting and stuff like that. The biggest financial windfall I get from writing books is that more colleges offer me more classes, and eventually better classes. Bajillions of writers make livings teaching writing, very very few can legitimately support themselves just on book sales and advances and the direct spoils of having people (hopefully) paying money for your stuff. If I on a book tour or travel to read it's never because I expect to make bank, it's because it's usually a paid-ish vacation and a good excuse to hang out with colleagues. Now, Neil Gaiman is a super rich guy, so I don't know, it's maybe just my impliciti bitterness and bile but I feel like if he's really feeling for someone who wants to take his class he should either offer lectures for free (as many authors do through bodies like Pennsound) or just accept that it's the nature of the beast. If he wants to get paid, nice, but if he wants to frame this as his benign gift to the world, I don't know, there are better ways to do so than Master Class. He's not your average writer, economically-- he's not teaching Intro Poetry to four sections of 30 kids so he can make his car payments. He doesn't need to be hustling. This whole thing isn't wrong but it is on a gut level sort of gross. Edit: I should note, full disclosure, that my field is poetry, so like-- if I see a candy bar in the trash I'm going for it, if you know what I mean, and most of my sample size is poets. Teaching is ubiquitous-- if you don't teach, you have an office job. That being said, I'm friends and colleagus with many many fiction writers and it's largely the same. A few hit it biggish and are able to just write for a living but that's super rare. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 22:19
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I get the point this guy is trying to make and like, I see which discourses he's drawing from, but sheesh, where were his editors? I think he meant to say-- I think-- that if comics evolved with a phallogocentric (not phallocentric) narrative and symbolic idiom, then it's worth thinking about how the basic structures of the comics page might look without it. The right-angled panel, the gutter as a stark divider between units of meaning, etc. as apodictic: "here's what is comics, here's what is not, and that's how we parse a page"-- I get it. and I think that wondering how and why those structures are coded as "masculine" and what alternatives we ight find is well worth asking. But like: 1) woman comics artists have been asking this for decades. It's not new and this reviewer isn't doing his due diligence to 1) woman comics artists have been asking this for decades. It's not new and this reviewer isn't doing his due diligence to write as if these questions are brand ne w. 2) Gynocentrism is absolutely the wrong word, and again, an editor should have caught that the first time, let alone the other 4,200,304 times it appears to crop up. I feel sort of bad because, like, he seems to like the book and I can only imagine that his goal in writing the review was to get more people to read it. I ask again-- where the gently caress was his editor. Vince MechMahon posted:"oh no, pure and good Neil has been corrupted by his evil witch of a wife," makes you sound like you should be on one of EVS's streams cutting up an Amanda Palmer record with a knife I think the point is that they're both tacky idiots.
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Feb 2, 2019 20:46
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Arivia posted:The entire review is referencing and building on a classic feminist media criticism essay, Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa." The use of phallocentrism (not phallogocentrism, although that's in there too), ecriture feminine, and gynocentrism all follow from the reviewer using Cixous' work as a lens to review Girl Town. TCJ being what is is, for better or worse (more often for better tbh), I'm sure he could assume pretty safely that most of his readership knows Cixous. The thing is though "The Laugh of the Medusa" is 44 years old and it's still a suggestive and powerful text but like any 44 year old thing it's showing its age. Gynocentrism is a term riddled with issues in 2019, not least of all because it's a fundamentally ciscentric term that equates feminine thinking and writing and embodiment with having a vagina (not entirely etymologically sound but the optics are bad) and often enshrines a kind of binaristic thinking that Cixous herself would resist. Yeah, that's a pedantic take and for sure I wouldn't toss out Cixous because of it-- it's hard to project any sort of gender essentialism on her when after she all she credits Joyce with writing in white ink-- but again, it's 2019, use a different word, just uncritically reiterating an essay nearly half a century old wouldn't fly in an academic journal, so why bother doing so in TCJ? Again, I agree that the essay, despite being a disaster of tone, potentially opens up valuable questions, and that Cixous is necessary to open those questions up. And I also agree that part of the problem here is that a lot of the people irritated at the essay seem to be blaming Cixous' stylistic tics on this guy. But I also stick by "gynocentrism" being a woeful choice in 2019 to denote what Cixous meant by gynocentrism. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 00:15
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Alhazred posted:I will never understand the right's obsession with using lots of money on buying stuff they're going to destroy. They're stupid and cowardly and since everything they can conceptualize is the warm backwash of mainstream ideology the only ways they can think of exerting any kind of agency are either buying something or shooting something.
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Feb 8, 2019 01:39
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Peterson is pretty good at sounding like he has something to say. I've mentioned this before I think but when I teach freshman comp or intro survey courses there's a always a certain sort of kid these days who was probably pretty bright in high-school, pretty jaded about public education, and disaffected in a rote teen way, who blundered into Peterson's orbit and brings some of his ideas into the classroom. It sucks and it's a minefield and a headache but really his ideas are super dumb and incoherent and 80% of teenagers who have a Peterson phase seem to grow out of it when offered better ideas, or when they realize that college in a big city is a lot more interesting than high-school in the burbs and that there are interesting people to talk to in real life your own age who aren't internet nazis.
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Feb 20, 2019 01:04
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site posted:well thats what i mean by loosest sense, he uses his position to give "weight" to push his bigoted poo poo but it's not like he's doing any worthwhile research with it Absolutely, let's not forget that the only reason anybody outside of his field (or to be frank, anyone within his field other than, I guess, his immediate colleagues) even knows who he is is because he took the "courageous stance" of adamantly misgendering students.
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Feb 20, 2019 01:34
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