A few of you have asked me to write about Human Wave, and I know I have to – having come up with this harebrained idea, I have to continue with it and give it some shape. Like a cat or a kid, it followed me home and now it’s my job to look after it.
Leave aside for a moment the fact that I think each of us, Human Wave writers can do more for writing and for the culture in general by writing fiction than by prattling on about what our fiction is or isn’t. Humans are curious beasties, sometimes when faced with the Rocharsh stain they need to be told if they’re looking at the hideous crone or the beautiful woman in the hat.
While I agree with Charlie that the guiding principle of Human Wave is “You may” we all know there are things that we read that are HW and things that aren’t. Even if sometimes we come down to “I know it when I see it.”
Well, let me bring a flashlight down and point it at the picture so you can see more clearly.
Part of this is Scott McGlasson’s fault, with his inferiority complex vis a vis his characters. (It’s all his fault mommy.) And partly it’s the way we’ve joked about loving/hating humans and how much butter exactly it takes to love them.
It is also at the heart of Darkship Renegades and if you squint intently, at the heart of my future history.
My future history starts with nations expropriating all those embryos resulting from in-vitro and making a bunch more and having them gestated in bio-engineered large animals (kind of like the mice who grow human ears) in an attempt to make up a massive short fall of people. (Yes, I do think world population is already falling, or if it’s not it’s because older people are living much longer. The problem is the modern state depends for its structure on having more young people than old. At any rate this is supposed to be 50 to 100 years from now. Shut up. Making predictions is hard, particularly about the future. You lays down your money and you makes your bet. That is mine.)
These people are by and large not quite normal. Part of it might be the timing of hormone baths and enzymes, which would be impossible to get right, no matter how modified the animal. It could also be the environment, since they’re raised in batch lots.
And eventually people get funny and decide, instead, to create supermen and to “improve” their own children. And then it all goes wrong because humans can’t be perfect, and being perfect can be the biggest flaw of all.
I was about to say we humans are a crazy animal, when it occurred to me that of course I don’t know how other animals are, not really. We have reason to believe – now – that cats and dogs have some form of memory and ideation.
Perhaps all animals can dream of an idealized version of themselves. Who am I to say?
I do know humans do. I am – on a good day and with enough caffeine – human, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.
And we humans can see an idealized version of ourselves – a perfect version, without any of those flaws and imperfections that mar the human body and soul.
It has run throughout all of human history: the thought of super-humans, or of angels, without flaw. For some of us those humans existed in Eden, seemingly perfect, until the flaw was revealed in the taste for forbidden fruit. For others, there was a perfect civilization where a mother goddess was worshiped and everyone was happy, until the unhappy ones – what? What’s that you say? No, no, I read the books, that seems to be the gist of it – subverted the whole thing. For others – Rousseau will never be dead enough – humans were noble and perfect before civilization.
We can ideate perfect humans. We can ideate a perfect life. And then we turn to our workaday world, chockablock with briars (and blockheads.)
This used to be disease prevalent in adolescence, particularly for well-off people. (By historical standards, we’re all well-off, which is why adolescence is actually a recent concept. Okay, Romans had it, but it was a… er… different thing.) The “Why does it have to be that way?” And the “But I hate humans” always sound, inherently, as though they were said by a sixteen year old. (And fresh from parenting a sixteen year old, the whine-that-can-cut-through-glass is loud and clear in my memory.)
It used to be for most people, though, wealthy or not, after adolescence, some form of integration was achieved. People came to see the ideal for what it was – something to strive towards, not something to demand. And sometimes, in special circumstances, they came to see their flaws for… well… good things. (Sometimes they are. Sometimes what causes people to do best are their worst traits.)
The reason people mostly came to terms with reality is that, well… what is there besides reality?
And that’s where we got tripped, starting around the fifties or so. I think, honestly, the issue was television. It looks real, but it is or can be flawless. I’ve often wondered how much of our divorce rate is based on the flawless, effortless families of the fifties sitcoms during the formative years of most now-adults. It seems as though study after study has shown we can’t tell the difference between TV and reality. Weirdly, no, I don’t think the down-glare on married life and what I’d call the “all relationships are sh*t” view of humanity prevalent now helps. Neither is actually like true reality.
Anyway, the problem is we now have – all of us – both wealth (you don’t usually worry where your next meal is coming from. Heck, I don’t, though there have been times in my life I did, they were brief and limited) and a vivid, collective fantasy life.
This has the result of a sort of extended adolescence. Our arts, the collective expression of our collective soul – or our culture for lack of a better word – have got stuck in the adolescent whine of “I hate people.” Which means the “moral” behind just about every novel, painting, story is “Humans are bad and we should all die.”
So, what’s wrong with hating humans? you say.
Nothing. Nothing if you could choose between humans as we are and your idealized humans that can exist only in syrupy shows.
The problem is those humans don’t exist. And the problem is the reaction of the culture to realizing this was to go into a prolonged tantrum that amounts to “If we can’t be perfect we should all die.”
This is a problem because it’s starting to have an effect. It’s become controversial to say “I love people.” It’s become controversial to say “Humans have achieved great things.”
All of which would be fine, again, if you could choose to be something else. But you can’t. For good or ill, we’re humans and humans are all we have.
Did humanity produce Stalin and Mao? Sure. But humanity also produced DaVinci and innumerable saints. Were any of the last without flaw? Well, no. They were human. All humans have flaws. Sometimes the reason humans strive to be good is that they see themselves as worse than they are. That’s one of those flaws that’s good for you.
But seeing yourself – or your species – as unredeemable is as blinkered, as pathetic, as seeing your species – or yourself – as angel-like, with no flaws. Neither of them have reality and frankly both of them lack internal tension. Both of them are therefore just plain bad art.
So, can Human Wave be dystopian? Sure it can. You don’t really need to scratch very deeply into the world of Darkship Thieves to see that Earth is a dystopia and Eden is a barely balanced near-utopia, but one that crumbles on contact. Humans are still humans. Unspeakable things can happen (contemplate Max’s fate, or for that matter Nat’s revenge.)
BUT through it all, humans are still humans. The ones who are good can be very very good. The ones who are broken are broken in interesting ways. The villains are – to borrow from Shakespeare – punishe’d. And the good, if not rewarded, have a chance to reward themselves to a measure. And the mixed can redeem themselves in future books.
Human Wave: it might be very dark, but a ray of light is allowed in. We don’t hate humanity, because if we do we can’t love anything. And there is always the option for a sequel.
You heard it here first.
According To Hoyt 
Human Wave? I don’t get it, being old fashioned. There are good people and bad people, and that’s when the fight started. Who gets to decide?
And the answer is, the survivers write the history books.
Human Wave. Human-positive writing movement.
“And the answer is, the survivors write the history books.”
Which is why Zero Population Growth folk amuse me in a dark way. Or the ones who refuse to have kids JUST because they don’t want to put more people in the world.
Go ahead, do that. MY descendants will get to enjoy the world then. 😉
They don’t believe in evolution.
Indeed, professed belief and actual belief (as revealed by actions) are in inverse proportions.
No, they believe in evolution. What they DON’T do is understand it. Or much of anything else.
The Soviets certainly had problems with genetics and Darwinian evolution (and the whole New Synthesis). Lysenkoism and the rambling on about the “New Soviet Man” seem to be totally Lamarckian.
They believe SO! VERY! HARD!
Cynicism is cheap.
The guys who kill the men, rape the women to death and slaughter the children may be the only ones to survive, but they’re still not good people. (At best, they might be less-bad, but that’s because of the “people do horrible things” angle.)
Calling darkness “light,” even if it’s popular, doesn’t make it so you can read by a burnt-out bulb– and difficulty in universally (or, more commonly, those picked as allowed to speak) identifying it doesn’t make a thing any less a matter of fact.
“….and they made a very satisfying *thump* when they hit the floor!”
Honestly, Sarah, I think we started going wrong with the invention of the telegraph. That’s when the world started shrinking, that’s when people started dreaming One-World-Government-ish dreams, that’s when people started taking eugenicists seriously. Technology that appears magical makes people believe that technology IS magical. Before then, yeah, people dreamed of utopia, but most technology was in the realm of, “Oh, look, that’s cool, but I can immediately see and understand how it works.” You know, outside of steam engines and alchemy/chemistry, which were oddities in real life unattainably out of the reach of the common man. Heck, a man could still become a doctor, dentist or lawyer just by reading a few books and hanging out a shingle in those days, and most people had to immediately suffer the direct consequences of their actions.
Magical technology, starting at the end of the 19th century, both convinced people to believe in magic and insulated people from the consequences of their actions. Without darwinism, we have the rise of the socialists.
Well, leftists of every stripe.
Yeah, see, there’s the problem — Leftists generally need every one of forty stripes with a cat in order to be worth a dram.
I could support public Flogging, if afterward the matter was ended. 8t would be better than our current system of every sentence is a life sentence.
Robert Malthus, 1766-1834.
I didn’t say we went wrong. I like my tech. I just said we need to understand what it’s doing to us.
To some extent, it’s an assimilation / future shock problem: it takes awhile to understand what each change does to us, to figure out accommodations to it that preserve what’s good (an experimental process carried out in real time of living beings), to actually be prepared for another change. And we never get that time.
which is why science fiction is important!
In a somewhat related note, Robert Heinlein, in one of the “flashback” scenes in To Sail Beyond the Sunset had Maureen’s father “predict” that the telephone would mean the end of the doctor’s house call. When people had to harness up the horses and drive over to the doctor’s house to get him, they would only do it for something really urgent. But when it became as simple as picking up a phone, the doctors would get called for every sniffle. And soon they’d say “enough” and that would be the end of the house call.
House calls still happened when I was very young but they were definitely on their way out.
Of course, Heinlein cheated. 😉 He wrote the story long after that had actually happened. So it was easy to make his character look prescient.
One of the (many many many) criticisms leveled by feminists is against the demand that women be held to some sort of male-defined standard of behaviour and deportment. Then they complain because men don’t adhere to the standards of deportment required by feminists.
Hoomans are the cwaziest people, as the old cartoon said.
And then they of course define standards of behavior for women which at least half of women can’t or don’t want to adhere to. Especially since those standards tend to be rather contradictory, we are both so weak we can’t be held responsible to our own behavior and so strong we can do everything at least as well or better than men.
😀 or 😥 ?
Feminism is incoherent except on the premise that it’s about what they want. Are women as aggressive as men? Well, are we talking about becoming CEOs and military officers, or initiating domestic violence? Is the care and raising of children immensely important? Is she demanding financial and other assistance to help her, or being asked to make sacrifices of her own? Etc.
I always thought that many problems feminists have with men is a basic misunderstanding of how men react to things. If a man is told you don’t need his help he’ll probably find something else to do. Even if he’s pretty sure you need his help. Tell him you want to be treated like a man and you’ll get treated like a man.
Put a man in a rough bar when a guy takes a swing at another guy. Will most men intervene? Not necessarily. Men are expected to be able to handle themselves. Sometimes this means you take a beating. Unless the odds are extremely lopsided and provided you don’t spill anyone else’s drink, help might be slow in coming. If a guy takes a swing at a woman then chances are someone will intervene because most men are taught to protect women. Or were until we were told to treat them like men. Being treated like a man isn’t always such a good deal.
Nominations still ongoing:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2040400-november-2014—-works-of-the-evil-league-of-evil-author
My opinion is when an author writes a book he/she sets the rules or conditions that bound the plot i.e. Dark Ship Sea cities depopulated world. If an author remains consistent then it has a chance of working. If not you may lose the reader. If the Hero does not have a flaw the book gets boring. Readers want the hero to overcome. The more difficult the more interesting the story becomes
I find it interesting that people assume the world is depopulated because seacities. this started with a reviewer. I don’t bother correcting it, but it’s never stated, and it’s in fact stated more than once the seacities started as tax/liberty havens. SOME portions of continents are depopulated, but there are probably still more people living in real lands than seacities. It’s just “the bias of the action” The characters are from seacities and so…
It seems especially strange because events in both “Darkship Renegades” and “A Few Good Men” make it pretty clear that there are still people living on the continents and that there are quite a few of them.
Yes. Some of those are new colonies, but only in areas that had been destroyed through war, etc. before.
Thanks for the clarification.
Both of them are therefore just plain bad art.
Great line. And it brought to mind Jonathan Hoag. Thanks for that Sarah.
I have enjoyed a few dark, dystopian fiction phases over time, and in those phases I’ve always found the best stories extend the dystopia from a specific event, trend or even individual. The worst stories are built upon a simple premise: “Because Humans!”
It is certainly true that the worst things humans have suffered have been at the hands of humans.
But, let’s finish the equation. The best things, the greatest heights, the most freedom and prosperity — these also come from the hands of humans.
Hope for the future (fictional and real) rests in the hands of humans, and I no longer have any interest in reading hopeless fiction. So, bring the Wave.
Oh, sure — who hasn’t gone through one or more dark, dystopian fiction phases … I still like Lovecraft. But it is not healthy as a steady diet. You gotta mix some RAH, Sturgeon, Anderson, Dickson, Niven & Pournelle in their for fiber. Not to slight Hoyt, Correia, Ringo & Kratman, but I decided to go with classics. Could’ve included Kuttner, Brown, Smith, Pohl & Kornbluth or even Bloch, Leiber, Moorcock, Simak, Russell, van Vogt, Pratt & de Kamp — but that’s probably too much fiber for the SJWs.
Both the Human Wave and Superversive ideas are quite encouraging, given the malaise in lit-fic and “publisher approved” genre fiction. One steady exception I’ve been following for almost 20 years now is Jan Karon. She recently wrote a new novel in her Mitford series in part because she wanted to see what the characters were up to. From what I’ve been skimming of the book, they’re up to coping with life in a small town, aging, growing, making mistakes and trying to do better, and leaving the world better than it was when they came into it. Redemption runs through all the books in the series, and I’d suggest that redemption, trying to do better, is a major theme in Human Wave, no matter if the genre is hard sci fi or kitchen cozies.
As much as we love humans, we also have to recognize that humanity, despite its unique attribute of consciousness, is just another species that is subject to the operation of natural selection and to the vicissitudes of Nature. Which includes drastic changes in the environment, and dystopian evolution, and population/civilizational booms and busts.
I have to disagree. Humanity seems to be a bit unique in that it has the capability to convince itself that it ought to go extinct. I don’t think there’s any other species on the Earth that’s currently capable of that.
None that I know of, but I’m not a [creature]-whisperer.
Well, yeah — they went extinct. 0:)
Pandas and this fella:
I have a biologist friend who is actually good with the Great Panda going extinct. His opinion is that any species that can’t be bothered to breed even when all the conditions are right is already extinct, it’s just the mechanics that are catching up to reality. It was also fun to watch him obsess over platypodes.
I wonder what panda tastes like. If they taste good, then there’s an incentive to keep the species around, and artificial insemination can overcome the breeding issues.
I think it’s more complicated than that. They seem to be hard to get to reproduce at all.
It is easy for some to forget that Evolution deems a millennium but an eye-blink. Pandas and cheetahs have all entered evolutionary bottlenecks from which there is no return. It will take a few centuries to play out, but there is no longer sufficient genetic variation within the species to allow it to persist.
Comment for comments and no comment about how I can’t get the WordPress to work so it automatically sends them to me.
I have, in the past, suggested that some pretty dark stuff is Human Wave. The particular example I used was the late Gordon R. Dickson’s post-apocalyptic Wolf and Iron. It was a “with a whimper, not with a roar” end of civilization scenario–financial collapse leading to breakdown of the “services” of modern society leading to breakdown of social order and a rise of roving bands of bandits/raiders completing the break. And yet, the story revolved around one person holding onto a bit of his civilization, working to preserve the knowledge that might help rebuilding, and building a better life within the new “order” of things.
“with a whimper, not with a roar”
The Time Machine might be the classic example of that. Wells has man evolve into rabbits in a chapter that was left out of the original story.
The Time Machine is fun, but it makes a lot of, IMO, unwarranted assumptions about social and technological development.
No argument there.
It’s fun to listen to people who like the childlike helpless Eloi and dislike the Morlocks. Many of those folks dislike the “capitalists” and don’t realize that the Wells character thought the Eloi were descendants of Capitalists. They must have only seen the movies not read the book. [Very Big Evil Grin]
Eh, stupidity can probably survive even that.
Of course, Wells’ socialist tendencies aren’t well known these days. While the Eloi and the Morlocks don’t exactly fit with Marx’s theories, I can definitely see some strong similarities with Marxist theory when looking at how both post-human groups arrived at the state they were in.
To me the time machine seems almost like satire. The War of the Worlds was a criticism of Britain’s (and European) colonization and empire building
I really enjoyed Wolf and Iron.
Good book.
And I think you’re spot on, it fits the Human Wave concept despite being fairly bleak regarding humanity and civilization in it’s time frame. The character was very HW.
Considering the headlines it is appropriate to bring up Eric Rodger Pianka and his rather frightening wish for humanity.
So removing the population of humans who live in tropical rain forests (3rd world, 2nd world, and parts of Canada and the US), fragile grasslands (oops, I’m outta here, so is much of China, Mongolia and Russia and the ‘Stans), and delicate estuary and wetland systems (there went San Fran, southern Louisiana, Florida, and swaths of Europe) is what we all need to be healthier and happier. I sense a few wee, technical difficulties with this scenario, starting with “where will the food come from” and “who will keep the human habitats functioning now that you’ve removed so many of the engineers, garbage men, and water-system operators.”
Otherwise it’s certainly a reasonable idea. (SIGH. What is it about biologists? Wilson the ant guy, Pianka and lizards . . .)
Biologists need to take more economics classes. Preferably not Marxist economics. “Overpopulation” is an artifact of corrupt governments and the consequent market distortions such governments cause. See Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, or North and South Korea for prime examples.
He’s not the first one with that idea. Amory Lovins was talking about it in the late 1970’s. Overpopulation was really, really big in those days with apocalyptic predictions of famines and epidemics for the 1990’s.
You notice that SF writers were writing about it earlier than then. Now that population is collapsing — forget predicting, they aren’t writing when it happens. Indeed, I’ve read SF stories where they invented immortality for the purposes of keeping population pressure.
Methinks they like imposing the controls against that better than those against population collapse.
The problem is that they love the idea too much. And, that there hasn’t been a hell of a lot of mainstream chatter about the issues of demographic suicide. When the various flavors of European native ethnicities have reproductive rates in the range of 1.4, you’d think that more people would see the implications. Maybe in the next generation or two…
I think there is some truth to the idea that a good deal of what is going on in the world is entirely due to the ravings of a rather massively self-hating group of intellectuals who managed to get themselves before the podium and rave freely. They convinced a bunch of people that they had it right, and the results are before us. I wonder what the majority of those European women would say, those that skipped out on having kids–Probably, some variation on “Who would bring a child into a world such as this…?”. It’s a crisis of confidence, more than anything else. And, I suppose it’s probably a delayed reaction to the charnel house that was the 20th Century in Europe.
I’d be willing to bet that anyone writing a novel or short story where an assumption was that the world was depopulated via a lack of reproductive enthusiasm would probably not sell. The gatekeepers believe in their message so much that it’s just not possible. The only place you’ll see a story like that is with independent publishing, I fear.
My guess is that they underestimate the difficulties of repopulating.
I also suspect for a fair number of them it’s also a way to preen, morally, over having few if any children.
I know that whenever I see a “child-free” person writing about it, somewhere in the morass of egotistical brags about how they are free to live lives of relentless hedonism is the moral posturing that they aren’t contributing to overpopulation.
I read a fascinating article on why the birth rate is falling so far in most of Europe, even across different cultures and in places where there are incentives, and it basically comes down to jobs. In Italy, for example, the birthrate is extremely low, and in a large way it’s because of how employment is structured. Basically, jobs are scarce and somewhat protected, and once you leave the industry you’re never getting back in. Generations of Catholicism can’t compete with being unable to work for the rest of your life if you stop working to have children.
Contrast that with the U.S., where you can get back into working even with an absence of a decade or more—it may not be easy, and you’ll possibly have to start from scratch, but it can be done. Hiring and firing are easy, so there are fewer worries about positions opening up.
RAAAACCCIIISSSST!
Some of them will actually say that the brown-skinned people will go on having babies, so we don’t need to worry about who will do the job of helping us as we grow old.
(False, BTW. They are just declining after ours.)
*tongue in cheek* *grin* Rhys and I seem to have no problems with fertility…
*flees, to lie down before I pass out*
Remember the woman who thinks women can talk to plants? She hits the advanced stages of that:
“Some women actually making food grow, so THOSE women can be put in charge of the food. Other women can be put in charge of the babies.If nobody wants to be in charge of the babies, then we won’t have any more babies, obviously.“
I keep being amazed that Lovins is considered an expert and a guru in any technical issue at all. He’s been politically correct and technically wrong for decades.
Me too. He’s another one of those leftists who continue being sought after for “consulting” even after being dead wrong on every issue.
I have a standard, prepared response for him.
“You first.”
Arthur Chu with a rambling discussion of disco, the Hugos and gamergate thrown in there somewhere. A true SJWs and GHHs uber alls.:
Chu seems to have missed the point of what happened to disco. Disco is dead because people stopped buying it. All those things that Chu seems to want? People have stopped buying most of that stuff too. Most SF fans have stopped buying those PC hugo winners a long time ago and indeed many have abandoned literature SF altogether. The same for all sorts of things. I think that people are tired of being preached to, told that were are bad people, some sort of “misogynist knuckledraggers” simply for existing. I think that more and more people are voting with their wallets and the SJWs don’t like the result. Which is why we get piece of crap pieces like this lashing out at people with great piles of hate. Well disco is still dead.
Actually the core of the issue is that that gamers buy $10,000 computers.
http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844
What this is all about, money:
“This is when everything fell all the way down the shitter.
Early this month, Intel announced that it would cease advertising on Gamasutra. It would later claim that it was unaware of Gamergate when it made its decision, but that it would stand by the decision and not advertise on Gamasutra. A handful of trolls, vaguely waving their hands about a non-existent sex scandal, had successfully bullied a corporation with a $158 billion market capitalization into doing their bidding.”
All the way down this scandal, you can see one side which has POWERFUL financial and political motives for smearing and discrediting destroying gamers. I think that it’s better to get the story from a source that doesn’t have a financial interest in one side of the story:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-closer-look-at-the-controversy-sweeping-video-games/
But intel can’t afford to piss off people buying those $1000 processors and their chipsets. Which is why Intel is dropping advertising on the corrupt sites. Game companies can PR there way out of a bad game and probably think that they can do without the gamer community. In fact I think that they would be glad to lose the “nerds” millstone around their necks. Intel on the other hands NEEDS gamers to buy their new high end processors. Intel has invested HUGE(billions) sums of money on the next generation chips and needs high end customers to buy those $1000 dollar processors. You don’t buy that much processor without wrapping it in a $5000 to $10,000 machine. It used to be that the markets for the high end were engineering and gamer. The problem is that engineering computers are mostly purchased by corporate bean counters and from personal experience it’s getting harder to convince them that You NEED the power of the latest and greatest when Solidworks runs just fine on the machine you have, which is a laptop and not a high end desktop anyway. there aren’t very many aircraft and shipbuilders that get real bang out of the high end processors and average computers have been able to handle most of the load for some time. So Intel needs gamers to keep buying high need machines for the performance. Now these machines are not cheap and require significant investments for what is a just a hobby. So Intel is terribly vulnerable to a boycott and that’s why it’s a HUGE deal that they dropped advertising. They can’t afford to lose 100,000 or 200,000 chipset sales. They are in too deep, they’ve invested more than they probably can afford. The gamers have the power of the purse and that’s why the corrupt press is working so hard to convince them that they don’t mean much before the boycotts REALLY hit. They are the desperate ones here. The Intel quote proves it.
Oops I didn’t cut the Chu Link:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/16/of-gamers-gates-and-disco-demolition-the-roots-of-reactionary-rage.html
I don’t want to read it. I’ll scream. We’re not enraged, we’re justifiably annoyed at the SJWs.
Watch the video with the nice lady using logic and reason that I put in by mistake instead. The amount of stupidity from the SJWs in gamergate is just incredible.
Video hasn’t shown up, maybe because you posted it in a comment containing more than one link and so it’s stuck in moderation until Sarah wakes up and releases it. I could use some logic and reason right about now, so could you repost the video link, with just a single link in the comment?
I specifically clicked the “Reply” link to John Carlton’s post. That was not a “typing into the wrong box” mistake. WORDPRESS!!!! (Insert shaking-fist emoticon here).
WORDPRESS!!!!
http://khaaan.com/
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!
this whole comment tree, stemming from the column, is mixedup.
My reply below was meant to address this comment. Summary: could you repost the video link, with just a single link in the comment?
for those who want the summary: you can tell who’s in the wrong by their race and sex.
Poor Arthur. GamerGate ate his brain. And it wasn’t even much of a snack, either.
I notice Arthur Chu manages to work in a sideways swipe at the Sad Puppies into his rant. Still sore about your side winning this year, Arthur? 😉
‘Course he is–they actually had to work this time, instead of letting the awards just plummet into their laps like windfallen apples. And since, as we all know, these people are Right and Correct and Good, they should not have to actually work for things.
Sad puppies, disco and the kitchen sink. Which left little room for anything more than the usual swipe at gamers. The thing is that these idiots don’t seem to realize that they are putting themselves on list they don’t want to be on. The gamers aren’t going to go after the idiots personally, they’re just going to keep sending those emails to the likes of Intel saying that their next computer might not have an Intel processor in it because Intel is advertising on those nasty sites. Intel buys a fair amount of advertising and right now they are VERY sensitive to revenue issues. I have to wonder how BIG a cluebat the SJWs need.
Was there some kind of contest this year?
*blink*
Why is it that when I see progs pontificate upon the evil awful evilness of we icky people that they hate so much, I immediately think of them acting like Dark Helmet from the “playing with your dolls” scene from Spaceballs?
(…and YouTube is blocked so I can’t post a link. Oh well.)
Skimmed it as best as I could. Managed to read his comparisons to past events and found them deeply flawed in one major way. He’s operating under the belief that it’s a bunch of people stuck in their ways angry at a bunch of new and successful upstarts who are bringing something radically different into play. His mistake is that he thinks there are two equal and opposing sides, one new and diverse, one old and stagnant and he’s wrong.
There are not truly two sides in this war. There is the side that buys the most games, has the most varied tastes, is most interested in new developments in the industry, is most willing to try something new and different if presented in an appealing way, and there is the side that only produced commentary and is only interested in getting a highly limited sort of game that in many cases may not even exist. One side literally does not have a dog in the fight, they want to, but they are demanding that someone provide them with said dog and that it must meet excruciatingly exact specifications or else it is invalid.
On one side you have people who buy first person shooters, third person shooters, platformers, racing games, cart racers, sports games, real time strategy games, turned based strategy games, stealth games, puzzles games, beat ’em ups, JRPGs, fighting games brawlers, surrealist experimental games, MMOS, free roaming sandbox games and everything else you can imagine, on the other side you have people saying that they might be interested in a specific game, not a genre mind you, but a single specific game, provided that all the minute details are just so teaming up with the people who don’t understand the industry but thing it should be more something. They don’t know what that something really is, but they think that developers should be more considerate and put more of it into their games.
People who only want one game are not ever going to get what they want unless they make it for themselves. That’s what has all the pseudo feminists and SJWs in a tizzy. They want someone to make a game for them, a game that they are incapable of making because even if they had all the resources needed they still wouldn’t know what that game was supposed to be.
Intel would much rather have IT people paying $1500 for the same silicon… just sayin…
Personal news, but thought some of you might like to know, since I’ve abandoned the book of faces: the Oyster Wife has found part-time work, I had an excellent interview this afternoon, and I’ve another scheduled for Monday morning. Apparently some people have a specific need for fast learners with experience digging through ancient, kludge-laden spaghetti code. Things are looking up! Thank you all for your encouragement, and especially those that gave me resume feedback and job leads. I have awesome friends on the Internet. Oh, and I got a couple of really interesting submissions for this week’s Promo Post. Should be fun.
Luck to you and your family, friend
Good luck my friend.
They’d like to create the world of Fahrenheit 451, but they’re having trouble with getting people to stop reading and just watch tv. So they’re writing things people don’t want to read in the hopes that’ll work. Might’ve, but Bradbury didn’t foresee the internet in that story, so their roadmap’s wrong.
Or not. But I bet you know which Eldest returned to the library today.
This is my feeling too!
The Internet has created a paradigm shift that none of the greats really predicted. It effectively killed the “memory hole” that certain politicians count on when they change their position every three months. This is why they are trying to kill political speech on the web.
Okay, no, this is just WordPress completely dropping all threading on the floor.
“It looks real, but it is or can be flawless.”
I have to wonder if this is why so many recurring mythological characters meet tragic ends. People need to be reminded that even the most perfect individual has a hubris and that it can, if allowed, destroy them in spite of everything.
Mr. Chu is missing his tinfoil hat; however, that’s not all he’s missing. His slanderous rag makes a living as a Liberal tool so he’s not going to be hurt by this, but the gamer journalists will. As mentioned above, the advertisers are getting nervous. So are the other gamers who aren’t into Warcraft, but, want to pick and choose their own games. If I was the publisher of the game magazines, I would be looking very seriously at changing (purging all) my reviewers and journalists and making sure that all gamers know that they will get honest reviews and articles in the future. Like, who buys gamer magazines, SJW and GHH or gamers? The publishers that want to stay in business are thinking…
I don’t know how my comment ended up in the middle of this instead of down here. If this one doesn’t move too. Chu, is very clueless or just needed filler space when he went on a rant. The Daily Beast is like the Guardian in that regard anyway; Damian and Arthur as counterparts. Didn’t Chu know that the ‘Disco Burning’ thing was a publicity stunt? On second thought, probably not, the Puritans were not noted for practical religion.
The complete idiot WordPress interface is gifted today.
More than counterparts: they’re buddy-buddy on Twitter. It’s nauseating.
One of the things that absolutely soured my on the ending of Close Encounters was the scene where the scientist and the guntoting Fed are standing together staring at the mothership:
Scientist: Einstein was right!
Guntoting Fed: Einstein was one of them.
Is there a fouler cliché in science fiction in any medium? “They” get Einstein, Christ, Gandhi and probably John Lennon; we get to keep John Wayne Gacy, Hitler and Nixon (assuming it’s a Hollywood production).