wickedqueen.net

Really EPIC asshaberdashery, though. Srsly. And it happened at WisCon, my first and favorite con, by way of a miserable self-hating gamer girl named Rachel Moss, who as it happens is also a graduate student at my own institution.

You may want to take a moment to catch up with the Angry Black Woman’s comprehensive explanation of what happened. (And skip to the bottom if you have no idea what WisCon is.)

I use the term “gamer girl” above with a healthy dose of irony–Moss does seem to indicate herself that her primary fannish interest is in game, and she is female, but in general I try to take care with my application of the label “girl.”* Here, I mostly want to highlight something that I see as a problem: many people who have reported on the Incident and/or discussed its ramifications have identified her as “young” or “very young,” often in an attempt to render her in some way pitiable–not excused; very few people are on board for that, but somehow slightly less responsible, or at least that’s how it reads to me.

Moss is 25 years old. She’s a year younger than me. She’s a graduate student at UW-Madison, just like me. Unlike me, she apparently struggles with an eating disorder** and has for many years. Like other posters on the subject I hasten to clarify that I think it is very sad that she has an eating disorder, and should never be grounds for attacking her–or, conversely, seen as an insult when I note that she has one; she has spoken about it publicly and it is, if I may say so, profoundly fucked up to act like saying “eating disorder” is equivalent to “her mother’s a whore.”

However, having an eating disorder and being an asshole are not the same problem. They do seem to be at least peripherally related; Moss hates other women, and what she hates in them seems to be all the things she most fears to see in herself: fat, “inadequate” or somehow unconvincing gender performance (as I’d interpret her transphobia), disability, etc. Claire Light puts it beautifully, and acknowledges some unpleasant similarities inside her own head that I would bet almost all women in this culture have experienced:

But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I’m also the enemy?

There’s still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I’ve come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it’s a tough one. It’s the same voice that tells me I’m fat, but it’s okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won’t admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed–if she ever tried–to stomp it out. She’s let that voice take over, and it’s a monster’s voice. That’s what she’s turned into for the time being: a monster, who’s projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that’s what’s happening with women who hate on fat women?

I definitely know that voice. I have done the “fatter than me” count in a room more than once. But the thing is, I don’t agree with it. I know the voice is fucked up and wrong. Even if–especially if–I start feeling like I believe it. Recently, I was discussing weight and body image issues with one of my favorite WisCon goers, and I noted that the big problem I have in entering discussions like that is that people often assume that because I am a small woman with a fairly intense workout schedule, I am judging them for lacking my “discipline” or however you want to term it. I’m not. I do sometimes get a little nuts about a couple of pounds of personal weight gain, mainly because I put on about 40 in my first two years of grad school and I recall that it starts with two or three, and also I prefer it when my clothes fit. And I like being strong, and knowing that I can bike 50 miles, etc. But this is my personal standard. It takes a lot of work. When other people are not as fit as me, I don’t think they are lazy slobs; I figure they have other stuff to do, because, eschewing false modesty, most people are not as athletic as I am.*** Most people don’t spend the time on it that I do, most people don’t bike 100+ miles a week, most people don’t do weight training ~3 times a week. Why the hell would they? Keeping in top shape is kind of like chasing storms or keeping a log of all the trains that come through town: important to some individuals, mind-bogglingly boring and/or insane to most.

So I don’t have an eating disorder, but I can get a little hyperfocused sometimes. On myself, not other people. And other people do have eating disorders–a depressingly large number of them, in fact. So far, only ONE person has come to WisCon two years in a row with the express purpose, on her second visit, of taking photos without permission and posting them online to mock people for being fat, disabled, trans, not white… In her original post, from what I saw, Moss was mostly focused on misogyny and fatphobia, but she didn’t shy away from asserting her authority to racially categorize all participants and thereby delegitimize their identities, and the racism that followed from the SASS crowd is, to a sheltered white academic, truly staggering.

I think Claire is absolutely right, both in her assertion of the psychological motivation behind Moss’s acts and also in her implication that Moss is very different from most women, who hear the voice but who do not develop a full-blown case of demonic possession by the patriarchy. For fucksakes.

A number of people have reposted and analyzed Moss’s opening remarks about the con–the con that she, remember, paid registration fees to attend not once but twice, although as a Madison resident she probably didn’t pay for lodging:

[WisCon] is like any other sci-fi con, except that well over half of the attendees are female, about a third of the panels are political, there is no gaming, and absolutely everybody is a huge bitch.

LiveJournal user hederahelix noted that contrary to her third assertion, Moss was sitting next to a gamer at one panel at least–since she sat next to hederahelix, and hederahelix is a gamer. I was on a panel about gender swapping in gaming during which there was a great deal of discussion about both MMOGs and table-top RPGs. At that panel, we also discussed the sexism and misogyny inherent in gamer culture on a number of levels: the automatic equation of healers with women, the reaction of a mostly male player base to the hiring of a female community manager at NCSoft, the way that male players often attempt to roleplay women (and absolutely refuse to hear “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG” from actual women)…

I said that Moss is not particularly young, and I don’t think she is, at least not in any way that excuses or even explains anything. But she reminds me of an angrier and more poisonous version of 14-year-old me in the sense that she is obviously looking for an environment where she has no competition for male attention, and I think what she hates most about WisCon is that it both fails to provide much in the way of that commodity AND fails to acknowledge that commodity as inherently valuable.

When I was 14, I was the only female member of the RPG club at my high school. I was a sophomore, and for an entire year it was me and a bunch of role-playing guys. The next year, four or five other female students joined, and at the time I would have preferred it if they hadn’t. I was younger than everyone else, I was funny-looking, and I wanted the gamer guys to myself. And even then, I didn’t try to chase anyone away, I didn’t give up on it myself, I didn’t turn around and attack the other women in the environment. I thought a lot of crazy things at age 14, and I made a lot of bad decisions. But even then I realized that other women were not the automatic enemy. And I was not a complete asshole.****

On a more positive note: the thing that I love most about WisCon is the way that its attendees celebrate ourselves. It is, I suspect, this very quality at which Moss grits her teeth like the Grinch looking down on Whoville.

Many people have commented that the photos held up for mockery by Moss and others show people who appear to be having a wonderful time. Many of them are photos of my friends: hilarious, kind, wonderful, brave people. People who are not afraid to BE. WisCon is one of the few places where I never feel like I am Too Much: too smart, too weird, too flamboyant, too chattery…

Not that I make much effort to tone these qualities down in Real Life; I have pink hair for godsakes. But at WisCon, I feel like people GET it. Instead of mere wide eyes and the occasional burst of helpless laughter, my ensembles garner heartfelt appreciation. No one wonders WHY I am wearing a lovingly restored lime green go-go dress with hot pink fringe dangling big plastic flowers. They just marvel at the matching go-go boots. They appreciate my nerd/folk mix CDs (speaking of, I met my goal of distributing 100 of them this year).

So on the one hand, I’m not much moved by people pushing pity for Rachel Moss, who set out to deliberately humiliate and harm a number of people whose happiness I value highly, and who is DEFINITELY not sorry about anything other than possibly getting caught. But on the other… okay, yes. I do pity her. I pity anyone who can stand two years running in the middle of all that exuberance and Not Get It, like Kay with a chip of ice mirror in his heart. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then why come back? There’s got to be something there that she wants, and she hates everyone who has figured out how to let themselves have it.

I love WisCon. I am extremely bummed that I missed almost half the con laid up with the Wischolera (and how awesome is a group of people that collectively comes up with the term “Wischolera”?) but I am already looking forward to next year, when I’ll be living right by the conference hotel again. I just don’t have much time to spare for people whose lives are governed by fear.

—

ETA: It occurs to me that many people may be totally confused about what WisCon IS. It’s a feminist science fiction/fantasy convention held in Madison, WI over Memorial Day Weekend every year. It attracts a lot of academic types, enough that there is an academic programming track; I presented a paper on gender-swapping in MMOGs there a couple of years ago, and it was really nice to be talking to an audience that didn’t need a 15-minute primer on “What is a virtual world” before I could get to the substantive content of my paper. A lot of very cool people attend from all over the country and even outside the US, and of course they (and the late night parties at which we get to hang out and drink ever night) are really the best part of the con. Some of us are, I suppose, “huge bitches”; others of us are really fairly small bitches with tall shoes to compensate.

—

*Not quite as much as I do with the term “lady”; if you hear me use this word or its plural, you may assume that I am mocking some misguided person’s ideals of “modern chivalry.” This is pretty easy to cue into given how much I tend to extend the “a” when I say it.

****At age 14, I admit, no one is a complete NON-asshole either.

It is a PTERODACTYL.

Pterodactyls were dinosaurs, which were REPTILES.*

WHY is the “artist’s rendering” DISTINCTLY FURRY?

What ARE they teaching them in these schools, dammit?

And dude, how awesome would it be to have a tiny pterodactyl of one’s very own? A tpersonal pterodactyl, if you will? I move we redirect all current bioengineering resources to this vital project.

Note: tpersonal pterodactyls should be available in pink.

—

*As I think I have previously mentioned, throughout my childhood, my parents mocked me relentlessly for saying “rep-TILE.” “Crawl on your belly like a REP-TILE!” they would cackle, insinuating that I was talking like hillfolk. To this day, I say “REP-tull,” which causes virtually everyone else to mock me relentlessly, but I cannot overcome my childhood conditioning.

And not the good kind, either, where someone gets caught being wanton in the conservatory and has to get married by special license.*

I got an email a few days ago from Rikhei asking if I’d heard about the possibility that Cassie Edwards was a plagiarist. At first I thought she was talking about well-known fanfic rip-off artist Cassandra Claire, which was confusing since that happened a long time ago, although I am STILL kind of appalled that someone would rip off Zelazny’s Amber for HP slash.** (This reminds me, I keep meaning to write a post about Zelazny and Amber. Later.)

Anyway, then I clicked the link to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, which I have actually read in the past and I don’t know why I stopped keeping up with it, and realized that no, she was talking about Cassie EDWARDS, well-known horrifying American Indian culture appropriater, unparalleled in her use of the Noble Savage Standing in for Sensitive New Age Guys Who Would Actually Be Too Anachronistic To Stand, Even for Zebra.*** Indian romances are pretty common–generally featuring an Indian or mixed race hero and a feisty white heroine. I actually did a project on constructions of American Indian masculinity in these books for a sociology of gender course I took as an undergrad,**** in which I concluded basically that they were stand-ins for Sensitive New Age Guys Who… you get the picture.

Well, apparently, the Smart Bitches tried plugging some of her more wooden and weirdly out-of-place passages into Google, and they discovered that the reason they were out of place is that they were TOTALLY FREAKING PLAGIARIZED. In at least one case from a 1928 ethnography, which I take special note of as a social scientist. Perhaps someday chunks of my dissertation will appear, uncredited, in a lusty tale of Facebook intrigue.

I thought this was sort of half entertaining, half infuriating, given how pissed off I get about plagiarism in general–I was, after all, raised by academics–and then I was browsing my usual infotainment sources today and discovered that the story had broken in the popular press: Nora Roberts says peer lifted material

(In case you are not particularly romance-aware, Nora Roberts is a Big Deal.)

The AP article actually pulls its best punch by using one of the less egregious passages from Edwards’s work; you should definitely review the SB series to see some really incredibly obvious theft. Confronted with it, Edwards response was not particularly surprising:

Edwards, interviewed earlier this week by the AP, acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Edwards said, speaking from her home in Mattoon, Ill. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.

Although the part where she put her husband on the phone to handle it was kind of shocking. I realize that the woman is like 70, but one assumes that she’s handled the majority of her business contacts, etc., at least in communication with an agent. And really, what more is there to say after “she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources”? It’s like she’s an undergraduate or something! A plagiarizing culture-appropriating bosom-heaving undergraduate. I am totally putting some of the examples from SB on my next “What is plagiarism and how terrible will the vengeance of my TA be if I commit it” hand-out.

In fact, the AP article actually quotes the developer of TurnItIn, UW’s preferred plagiarism detection software: “Ms. Edwards’ unattributed use of other peoples’ work as her own definitely constitutes plagiarism.”

I wonder if she’ll be stripped of her RWA (Romance Writers of America) lifetime achievement award.

—

*Ask me about the peerage some time. I should also note that I use the term “bodice ripper” with love. Before 11-year-olds could find porn on the internet, there were other people’s mothers’ stashes of romance novels.

****It was the only sociology course I took as an undergrad, actually. And now I have a masters degree!

I’ll say upfront that I don’t know why the hell The Internet is represented here by a charming floral arrangement of brightly colored iMacs, which haven’t been available since, god, I don’t know, my sophomore year of college? People just like Macs because they look like spaceships.** Anyway.

The take-home point here is that writers get paid 4¢ of residuals for a $19.99 DVD (yeah, I haven’t paid that much for a DVD since I was feeling despondent about relationships and Mr. & Mrs. Smith was a new release, but you know, whatever). They get the same percentage on online downloads despite the fact that, as a reasonably bright chimp could probably work out, online downloads cost the production company VIRTUALLY NOTHING (DVDs cost them, like, a quarter).

Writers get no residuals at all for screenings of their work that are streamed online–which happens to cover about half of the television I consume, now that I do not own a TV at all.*** The networks argue that streaming online content is “promotional,” but if you’ve ever watched any of it, you know that it is full of stupid-ass ads for Visa. One assumes that the networks are not screening Visa’s “promotional” material for free; in fact, we’re talking about over $4.5 billion in projected ad revenue in the next few years, which I can assure you I would not be screening here at home for fun. I watch those stupid-ass ads for Visa because they’re embedded in television programming that I actually want to see, which was written by writers who would like, you know, something more than 0¢ for their role in generating that avalanche of ad revenue.

I’ve seen some responses on YouTube that entirely miss the fucking point here. Mainly, people are upset that writers get paid a salary for writing things and then–madness!–get paid MORE MONEY when their product does well. Well, gee, do we also rage against the practice of commission sales? Who benefits most when the product does well? The writer with his/her 4¢ per DVD sale and a big box of air for all those online streams? Gee, could it be the production companies, the heads of which already get to swim around in vaults of doubloons like Scrooge McDuck?

Residuals/royalties are normal compensation for artistic endeavors. They account for the fact that you don’t KNOW how much “Happy Birthday” is going to end up being worth when you pay some schmo to write it–or, say, Pirates of the Caribbean. I know I wasn’t expecting THAT to turn into a freaking trilogy.

My friend Nick from high school has been helping out with the strike even though he’s not yet union. I got the above video link from him; you can also see photos and video from the strike on his MySpace blog.

—

*Not that I’m saying this is what I DO. Although the primary reason that I don’t is laziness, followed by impatience. Which reminds me, the latest episode of Chuck should now be up on NBC.com… For which its writers will see exactly 0¢.

***I “sold” it to my sister. I think she still owes me $30. On the bright side, I didn’t have to move it again.

That’s me and some other kid in 1984. I’ve always loved that photo. Whenever I look at it, I think, If only I could get back into a wheelbarrow FULL OF GRAPEFRUITS. Everything would be okay if I was sitting on top of a wheelbarrow full of grapefruits.

My dad’s been scanning and uploading old family photos to his Flickr account. There was piece on CNN recently about the new trend in obsessive digital documentation of one’s children; as something of a compulsive photographer, however, I personally am not too worried about “fail[ing] to enjoy living in the moment.” I like to take pictures; it’s part of my enjoyment of some moments. I do get annoyed when I’m not IN any of the pictures, which is why it’s good that in my family, both my father and I take a lot of photos. It’s always a danger, when you have one documentary photo taker in a group, that they disappear almost entirely from the photographic record.

The article also panics over the possibility that photo formats could change; formats are always an issue with digital media, but I doubt we’re going to wake up one morning to discover that all of a sudden, .jpgs no longer work. Batch conversion is a pretty simple job these days. And while it may be true that “some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online — not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints,” it costs $25 a year for a FlickrPro account that WILL retain the original high-res versions, and you can also order prints of photos you upload to Flickr, either for pick-up at Target or to have shipped directly to you. A lot of the problems that the tech news people like to focus on are really “less advanced user” problems, which you know, they could actually address with helpful tips.

It may, however, be worth considering that publicly available photos on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites really are available to “the entire world.” One of the photos my father put up featured my sister and me in the bathtub in 1984. It got 11 views in about a third of a day. It did apparently have “bath” in the title, and I’m pretty sure that the pedophiles are a heavily networked community, so I guess only one of them has to stumble on a particular photo to start it on the rounds. Dad set it to friends only.

Yes, I have always had freaky hair.

Actual interaction I had with some craigslist lame-o who emailed me and called and was two hours late getting back to me about picking up two six-foot floor lamps:

“Do they disassemble?”
“Yeah, they unscrew into like three pieces, so they’re easy to move.”
“Would they fit in a backpack?”
“…They’re SIX FEET TALL. EACH. …No, they will not fit in a BACKPACK.”

I had to email someone else, who showed up in like 10 minutes with a pick-up truck, so they’re not ALL freaks. And they certainly aren’t all freaks like this:

Missed Connections: Pedestrian hit by car this morning

I was in the car behind the red SUV that hit you this morning. I didn’t see much of what happened, but I know we had a red light. You looked like you weren’t hurt too badly - maybe a bit dazed, but walking around, so I didn’t stop. Kind of wish I had, just to be sure. Feel free to email back if you want, just to let me know you’re ok.

Oh, craigslist. You guys are freaks.

And apparently some of you are prostitutes. Yeah, who saw that coming.

I am getting sort of settled into my new apartment. I have furniture, and I’ve started hanging pictures and putting up posters and shit. Soon I should even have a bed frame. Oh, the luxury.

The important thing is that I hung the Scary Child:*

I thought long and hard, and that was definitely the scariest place to hang it. Home sweet home.

—

*The Scary Child is a piece of art–we’re not totally sure WHAT the medium is–created by my cousin and given to his brother, another cousin, who promptly gave it to my mother when she saw it in his house and remarked that it really reminded her of me. This is the fourth apartment that it has graced with its terrible presence. Matt really hates it.

Giuliani’s daughter caught in Obama campaign Facebook group:

On his daughter Caroline’s Facebook profile, the self-described liberal was a part of a group that supports Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid. After Slate.com emailed her about her about it, she immediately left the group, the web site reported.

People. For the last time. Facebook is not secure, okay? Even if you have your profile totally locked down (this would include blocking, say, the faculty at your institution, particularly if you plan to lie about funeral attendance to get out of class*), a public group will still show your membership, and only one person has to see you in that group and tell Slate, and then CNN picks it up, and then you are IN THE NEWS. Particularly if you are Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, and thus already of some baseline interest to the media. Although frankly, if you are Giuliani’s daughter by Donna Hanover, I’m not sure why you’d be making any effort not to embarrass him.

And apparently she didn’t even have her profile locked, although Slate.com reports that she “uses a slight variation of her name on the Facebook site.” Several Slate comments assert that this is no excuse:

She is a kid, not a public figure, regardless of the technical legal status of the information posted on Facebook. That may matter to your lawyers but not to ordinary people. Do you not care about her as a human being at all? Is there no common decency left anywhere?

…

Yes, you as one of the 42,000 people affiliated with Harvard or Trinity were able to see it, but that doesn’t mean that you had permission to publish it for the general public’s viewing on Slate. While I don’t support Giuliani, I don’t think that it’s fair to invade his daughter’s online privacy either.

Look, there is decency and then there is verging-on-idiocy. How many stories have to be broken through Facebook before users figure out that it is NOT PRIVATE? Personally, I prefer to believe that Caroline Giuliani did it on purpose and then left the group out of some kind of misplaced after-the-fact guilt, because that is nicer than thinking that even the most recent wave of Facebook users, freaking 17-year-olds who probably can’t remember life before the internets, cannot figure out that if you post something “private,” “secret,” or “illegal” on Facebook, SOMEONE WILL FIND OUT.

Facebook! Is not! Private! And you are not doing anybody any favors by pretending that it is, because as this story demonstrates, there are too many people who are not going to go along with your magical fantasy world. Would you teach your children that everyone always uses their damn turn signals?

And then there was that story that CNN presented as unmitigatedly heartwarming, although I thought it was a little weird and obviously an extreme outlier: Mom reunites through Facebook with son she gave up for adoption

—

*True story.

In case you haven’t already heard about Oscar, the cat with the amazing ability to sense the approaching icy hand of the Reaper…

As Travis pointed out, it may have been published as an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it sure reads like something your obnoxious elderly relative decided to forward you via Hotmail:

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.

One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.

Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

…

Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.

As Travis also pointed out: Barf.

Furthermore, I think anyone who has ever owned cats can attest that, if they COULD kill with mind bullets, they probably would. Especially if they were hungry, or someone had failed to clean the litterbox, or they were just feeling generally neglected in favor of someone’s dissertation. “Uncanny ability to predict,” my ass–hasn’t it occurred to anyone that Oscar the cat might be psychically smothering the elderly?*

And man, since when do we refrain from assuming that correlation equals causation, anyway? When it would interfere with the innate human need for Baby Jesus Angel Death Kitties, I guess.

—

*Shout out to frippy, who once had an argument with a co-worker who insisted that cats DO, TOO suck the breath out of babies.

Yes. The bottom right corner of this PS2 advertisement does actually say Because your girlfriend bores you shitless. How you managed to actually GET a girlfriend remains a mystery.

This is just another manifestation of how the general gaming culture, even as it is propagated by the people who ostensibly want to sell it to anyone who will buy, is extremely hostile to women. You hear these marketing people flapping their jaws about how they think women just don’t like SHOOTING ALIENS or something, and THAT’S why they don’t game (putting aside, for a moment, the many women who do–they’re still vastly outnumbered by men outside of casual gaming), and then they turn around and produce this shit. Gee, I wonder why women think they wouldn’t have a good time gaming. Could it be because half the market goes out of its way to suggest that all the OTHER gamers are witless misogynistic man-children?

You may recall NCSoft’s addition of female NPCs to City of Heroes–specifically, non-combatant air-headed gangster girlfriends. Do you notice a common theme here? Oh, those women! They’re boring! Because they’re stupid! Because all they talk about is clothes and stuff! Silly women! Can you believe they got the vote?

Well, to be fair, there’s a second PS2 ad suggesting that sometimes women are boring because they talk about other people’s interpersonal relationships. And in case you didn’t click through, here’s that CoH screenshot:

Pretty much the only women with whom you interact, apparently, are “girlfriends.” (Note the NPC’s designation in that screenshot.) Women exist in this world solely in relation to men (and not even in any other relationship other than “annoying pet”; what, gamers don’t have MOTHERS?), who apparently tolerate them for sex, since they’re so damn boring otherwise. All these women think about is their appearances, probably so that they can keep the poor bored guys enthralled for some more of that sex, which I’m sure is really awesome and satisfying. Naturally such boring and stupid creatures wouldn’t have any interest in the manly pursuit of GAMING.

Hey, Sony? Maybe what with getting your ass handed to you by Nintendo and all, you might want to consider some new tactics that don’t specifically alienate one of the major groups Nintendo is wooing. Or, you know, I guess witless misogynistic man-children ARE a niche.

Thanks to belleweather for the link.

—

ETA: This is not to suggest that I think that clothes are stupid and/or boring. No one who has ever met me would credit it. This is, of course, the flip side of “women only talk about things that are frivolous and boring”; that is, “if women talk about something, it must therefore be frivolous and boring.” I find clothes vastly more interesting than cars or football, and you know, pretty much everyone HAS them. We won’t go into how extremely cute my outfit is today, even though this is my blog and anyone who doesn’t like it can take their PS2 and go jump in the lake.

It happened in Madison, too, although the victim is not a sociologist.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Lipscomb said he has had some lingering headaches and a stiff neck.

“All things considered, that’s about as good as it can get,” he said.

Despite the close call, he said, he has to focus on school because his qualifying exam for the Ph.D. program is next week.

“I think it will probably hit me when I’m done with exams,” Lipscomb said.

Lipscomb does plan to ride again, he just prefers to wait until after exams are over.

All I ever did while studying for prelims was go on a diet, and a lot of people were pretty amazed that I was willing to do THAT.

Of course, as a helmet proponent of many years, I find the story interesting for its clear demonstration of their value, but man. I think you have to have spent a month buried in your office reading the Social Psychology Handbook, coming home at midnight only to watch episodes of Cold Case in your darkened living room and WEEP, to really understand why this guy does not currently have the emotional energy to process having had HIS HEAD RUN OVER BY A TRUCK.

Yes, every morning when I wake up, right before I start worrying about my dissertation, I experience a little shock of bliss that I am DONE WITH PRELIMS. And also I am grateful not to have been run over by any trucks thus far.