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.

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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.

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*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.

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.

Thanks to wicked anomie, who posted about it first:

I am feeling a strong inclination to find one of Frontalot’s shows and throw my underwear at him. Although I suppose my dice collection might be more appropriate, as well as more likely to put out someone’s eye. Blinding someone with a d20 is nerdcore, right?

You can get the high-res version of the video at the official site, which also offers assorted merch. I am leaning toward the purple ladies t-shirt.

In case you did not play Zork and require some explanation: Grue (monster)

This semester I will be blogging weekly for my course on collaborative learning, because it is a requirement; I will be doing it here rather than on the course site because a) I have enough blogs to maintain already and b) there’s a precedent, if you’ll recall my many prelim-studying entries and those times I geeked out over the stuff we saw in Alice’s digital media literacy class; besides c) my audience is hella nerdy anyway.

I was surprised to find that the first week’s readings actually referenced conversation analysis (CA) quite a bit. Back when I was studying for my prelim on the subject, I read several chapters from an anthology on CA and cognition, so it’s not that I don’t think it’s appropriate for the subject under study, but it’s always interesting to see what people who were not actually trained in CA make of it. Usually something that would make the hardcore CA people cry, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, given the focus of the course and thus the readings on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in the service of collaborative learning, and particularly text-based quasi-synchronous CMC (e.g. chat), the data seem well-fitted to CA. If your concern as an analyst is that you have access to all resources that were available to participants at the time of interaction, chat logs are pretty comprehensive, especially if they’re time-stamped.

In some cases, though, lack of unique adequacy raised issues for me; “‘[u]nique adequacy’ is defined here as the researcher’s ability to analyse the encountered social world from practitioner research rather than from ‘classical social theorising’ (Cuff et al., 1992) perspectives” (Wakefield 2000). Stahl (2006) seems to suggest more difficulty with tracking parallel topics in chat than I believe most participants actually have, especially if they’ve been using chat for their own personal purposes for any length of time. The book was published in 2006, but I’m not entirely sure when the research he references using CMC for group work on math problems was conducted–certainly a major issue in research on the internet in any context is that today’s internet is a dramatically different place from the internet of even five years ago, and the average participant gets more and more savvy with the passing of time.

On the other hand, technologies and applications also change very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much the only people MUDding now are the same people who were MUDding in 1992 when it was an exciting topic for academic research. MMOGs are certainly the virtual descendants of MUDs, but they’re not quite the same and they are occupied by mostly different people. Email lists, while not dead, definitely seem to me to be on the way out, although perhaps not in academia as in the general population–my main exposure to email lists outside of academia was in activism and fandom. I wanted to talk about sexuality and read Star Trek pornography, and for some time, those needs were mainly met by Usenet and listservs.

Now, however, there are websites, particularly hive communities like LiveJournal, and communities on Facebook. Almost all the undergraduates who I interviewed last semester about Facebook use remarked at some point or another that email was “formal” and not something they used for socialization or personal communication. This is probably not going to stop academics, because we are the kind of people who like spreadsheets and monographs and Being Important, but for everyone else, email seems to have become sort of stuffy and boring, like actual mail or something.

Even chat, which is to me so familiar that I tend not to distinguish in vernacular reports whether I was talking to someone face-to-face or virtually, may be on its way to obsolescence even as I type. Text messaging on mobile devices seems a bit different in character than chat, and now that everyone has a cell phone and everyone is also online, I think there are fewer extended interactions happening in chat, even if people do leave their AIM up as a kind of answering service, competing to have the deepest or wittiest away message in the dorm. Or, you know, I’ve always been weird; maybe it was always more random solicitations for cybersex than anything else. It’s not like my college chats were deep, but they were properly punctuated.

Really, I just wonder how long it will be before computer voice chat largely supplants text chat. Gamers already prefer it; they use third party applications to supplement the game interfaces that supply only text chat because it’s so clunky, especially when you’re trying to coordinate raids. I use Skype when I play City of Heroes, and I’ve also started using it to call my parents because my cell phone service is so shitty in my new place. As everyone’s systems catch up, I can easily see more and more people using voice chat in place of the phone, but also in place of “impersonal” text. Voice may kill the chat star. Maybe. On the other hand, there are advantages to not being totally present for the people to whom you’re talking, and sometimes I don’t want to devote that much attention.

Once again, I have to say simply that all I know about the internet in five years is that I probably can’t imagine it. Sure, I want that headjack as much as ever, but even if I get it, there’s no telling what comes with it. It makes it hard to keep your research current.

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.

So last night I was on the phone with a good friend from high school with whom I tend to touch base three or four times a year, which means that this was the first he’d heard about my career-ending mud wrestling injury. I mentioned that there were photos of the match online, and he immediately plugged my name into a Google image search, although if I’d realized he was at his machine I could have just sent him my Flickr link–but if I had, we might never have made this amazing discovery.

A few minutes after he found the relevant photos, there was a long silence on his end. I prodded him verbally.

“Uh, Cabell, are these your boobs?”
“Excuse me?”
“Over this PS3?”
“WHAT?”
“I did a google image search on your name, and there is a headless bust over a PS3.”
“Well, it’s definitely not me; I don’t even HAVE a PS3–where IS this?”
“Google image!”

So I google image searched myself, and sure enough:

I would like to reiterate here that this photo is NOT ME. I know how sometimes people miss these things, like when I went to that strip club on amateur night purely out of sociological curiosity and NOT AS A PARTICIPANT, DAD, but apparently wasn’t clear enough on that point in the initial blog entry.

So, yeah. That photo up there? Not me. It is, however, in the top row of results when you put “cabell gathman” (although not actually with the quotation marks in the search term) into Google image search. The rest of the row consists of the side-by-side of me and Andromeda Sparks (my main CoH avatar), my Flickr user icon, a graphic from January’s winning IAP Games Competition entry (the team for which I was on), and two different photos from Truman State University’s newsletter that do not include me but do seem to be part of coverage of events in which I was involved.

So what’s with the PS3 boobs, you ask? Well, the graphic was originally embedded in an entry of the Electric SistaHood blog’s review section, and ESH once linked to a column I wrote on female gamers for Strange Horizons. As far as I can tell, the particular page in which the actual photo was embedded contained no reference to my name, though, so it seems odd that it comes up so high on the results, except that maybe there are a lot of people google image searching me all the time and that’s their favorite photo?* IT’S NOT ME.

As a researcher of social networking sites, I naturally hear a lot about context and context collision and people who didn’t realize that their parents/professors/employers were going to see that picture of them doing body shots at a party, but I hadn’t really considered the growing possibility of cases like this, where your identifying information may end up linked to bizarre things that have nothing to do with you because you are both connected to some random OTHER thing. Confounding factors!

Which is funny in itself, since this very domain is still inaccessible from many locations that employ internet filtering software because there was a time period during which it was in the hands of pornographers, and so it’s still on a lot of outdated block lists. You’d think I’d have thought about the way that spurious connections might arise out of the vast sea of data that is the internets.** It seems like I am actually LESS likely than most to fall victim to this, because I have a weird freaking name, but on the other hand, when your name is a truly unique identifier, people are probably much more likely to assume that okay, yes, those must actually be your PS3 boobs. (THEY’RE NOT, DAD.)

Probably having publicly admitted to mud wrestling doesn’t help, either, but you know, I’m sorry, that is just how I roll. But I do not now nor have I ever owned a PS3.

(And yes, I know this post is just going to make this search result about a billion times more robust, but at least there’s a chance that people will then click on it and see this blog entry, right? …Yeah, like I believe anyone but me checks the source page.)

—

*If you or someone you know spends a lot of time google image searching me, a) don’t tell me, and b) Matt is going to be totally unsurprised, as he once claimed that I would have the most self-portraits available online of anyone in the world if it weren’t for cam girls.

**John: It’s not just a big truck you can just DUMP stuff in, you know. IT IS A SERIES OF TUBES.

I know it’s because a lot of the early literature focuses on them, which makes sense because they were actually a new and vibrant online community when the early research was being done, but at this point I don’t think they’re terribly relevant unless you’re trying to explain the difference between hard core internet geezers and everyone else, which hardly anyone ever is.

So anyway, I got back from ASA and I’m tired because my internal clock thinks it’s midnight and the margaritas from happy hour at Compadres to celebrate my triumphant return have worn off.**

I met a lot of cool people doing interesting work, and I thought that our presentation on third places in virtual worlds went quite well, especially when you consider that it took place at 8:30 in the morning on the first full day of the conference. A more substantive post may or may not follow in the next few days; please recall that I now have 10 days to pack all my shit and move back to Wisconsin. And there’s a poster presentation at PARC in there somewhere, too.

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*Year chosen because that’s the year I started playing MUDs, but I was sort of late. And they didn’t really take off at my junior high, although I did inspire a few fellow orc slayers.

**After the conference, I felt it was best to gradually reduce the alcohol consumption rather than abruptly cutting it off.

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.

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.

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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.

Someone has developed a ‘Top Eight’ plug-in for Facebook.

As most Facebook users know, recently Facebook started allowing third-party applications that you can embed in your profile. Unlike MySpace, they still exert a lot of control over profile appearance; you still can’t put in background images or blinking text, which I think we can agree is for the best. However, the “Top Eight” is ganked directly from one of the bare bones defaults of a MySpace profile: the display of your eight “best” friends’ names and profile icons.

I’m not sure if the new Facebook plug-in uses a static order the way MySpace does; I’m a little reluctant to install it, although my reaction is not as negative as some:

stop trying to make it like it - if you wanna depress people by saying who your “best friends” are then go to myspace.com

As reported elsewhere, this smacks more of favouritism than convenience, and as such, I disapprove of it, also, but at least we do have the option of whether or not we use it, unlike with MySpace.

definately. myspace is ok, but facebook is more for school people than every single person in the world… leave the top friend drama at myspace

This is not myspace. I won’t be friends with anyone who uses this tool…

Wow, facebook is really turning into Myspace. I remember when facebook was for college students only. I miss those days.

ahh this is so lame!! i can’t believe this obvious copy of myspace!
and to the people who said don’t add it and it won’t be a problem — you still have to deal with your friends who get it. how would you feel if you have to find out through facebook that you aren’t one of their “BFF”s ?

Why am I not surprised that most of the people who like this application are high school punks?

exactly..thats why facebook isnt for middle school, theres no need for the extra drama.

Young son, when i was in high school, Facebook was for people who got into real colleges. Yeah this app bothers me too and yeah I’m not gonna use it. I don’t wanna leave facebook cuz there is nothing else like facebook the way it was about a year or so ago (man it was perfect then). Next people will be able to change their profile colors and make them annoying pink and purple [editor’s note: this is an interesting foray into implicit misogyny–makes a nice break from the classism, anyway], then there will be wallpapers, then youll be able to change the font, then music will play automatically when you go to someone’s profile, then there wll be all kinds of moving crap in the background. The changeable layout and these little apps like top friends are just the start of it. They keep trying to make things better when in reality “less is more.” Facebook was better like a year ago and I wish there was a way to keep it from slowly drifiting toward myspace. Reply and fire back if you want, I don’t care.

To all the high schoolers who tell us to just “not use this app”, go back to Myspace. College students never truly wanted high schoolers or anyone else for that matter, aside from college students, on this website and now look what’s happened.
All of these apps are being developed with Myspace-ready high-schooler friendly mindsets. Apps like THIS do NOT belong on Facebook. Just like adding music that plays automatically to your profile doesn’t. Just like changing your profile away from the basic blues and simple style doesn’t.
It’s all a matter of time before the high schoolers/outsiders demands get too heavy and Facebook begins pandering to you dimwits.

The discourse has a lot of references to the general superiority of Facebook over MySpace, and specifically to the idea that opening Facebook to non-(college) students made it more like MySpace and therefore not as good. This is really just a continuation of the discourse that sprang up immediately before and after Facebook opened membership to the public–just now people can point at specific things they dislike and say the riffraff caused it. There are plenty of people making the counterargument “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it,” so don’t take the comments cited above as indicative of a unified stance on Facebook (yeah, it is to laugh).

I can certainly understand objections to MySpace-ification, but it’s interesting to me that people so immediately blame the presence of non-university students, as if they’d never met anyone they disliked or considered stupid in college. Don’t any of these kids have to take College Writing with a bunch of idiots? Also, the perception of MySpace as dominated by high school students is not entirely accurate–certainly not if you think they’re the driving force behind the mp3s that play automatically on profile pages. I’d say the indie musicians who use the site for distribution are much more invested in that particular feature. The internet and pseudo-intellectual elitism: two great tastes that continue to taste great together, I guess.

Actually, looking at that throw-away reference to pink and purple profiles, I’m now wondering if MySpace suffers from negatively valenced feminization in the same way that LiveJournal does; the site is often perceived by internet users as a young, female ghetto, despite the fact that there are significant enclaves of older and male users, and who you see there really depends on your particular social network and how you manage it. Just not the kind of people you want to be associated with–stick with Blogspot.

Interesting.