Zach proves why nobody doesn’t like Molten Boron
An excellent piece dissecting the Kotaku commenters’ reaction to the launching of Cerise.
Now, it’s not like the commenters at Kotaku are particularly bright, bless their black little hearts. But I’m fascinated at how a site like Kotaku could have commenters, not offer any kind of moderation of extraordinarily sexist comments, and then complain that women’s voices aren’t being heard. Let’s pretend I have a two-year-old demon child. Two-year-old demon child likes to pick cats up by their tails, and then kicks the cat when the cat scratches them. I have seen this happen repeatedly. Not once have I told the two-year-old demon child “don’t pick the cat up by the tail. Don’t kick the cat for defending itself.” Then, to the coffee klatch later that week, I have heard to loudly marvel at why I don’t see many cats around my house.
I love Zach’s musings about the shutupicrats:
Until I got onto the internet I had never met somebody who gets actually angry about the fact that some people care about things that he or she doesn’t. It would be sort of interesting to meet some of these people in real life:
IN A GERMAN LANGUAGE CLASS:
“Excuse me, but why in the hell are we learning German? I don’t want to speak German, and I don’t see why anyone else should. Can’t we all just speak English and shut up about stupid foreign languages I don’t care about?”“If you don’t want to take German, why are you enrolled in this class?”
“I’m not; I was just looking on a bulletin board and noticed that German was being taught, and since I don’t think German is interesting I felt I should come here and let everyone know that they’re being stupid and wasting their time.”
AT A DINER:
“Why do you serve blueberry pancakes? I hate blueberries, and I don’t really like pancakes that much, either. If people would just shut up about their blueberry pancakes I could get back to ordering waffles in peace.”
May 9th, 2007 at 7:27 am
I think this whole “Kotaku is hostile towards people expressing Feminist viewpoints” followed by “Kotaku questions the need of said people expressing Feminist viewpoints to make their own community to discuss these viewpoints” is a really great argument against them. The only question is, are they actually smart enough to register their own blatant hypocrisy and hostility towards others enough that it will shut them up?
I personally think its more likely they are too stupid to find an argument to counter that and will simply descend into their usual tirade of spouting offensive shit and wasting time.
Credit to Zach though, and in a language most Kotaku commenters are likely to understand: Kotaku got fuckin pwned noobs! ZOMG! Zack is teh r0xx0rz!1!one!11!!eleven1!!!
May 9th, 2007 at 8:24 am
I really can’t see why some male gamers think female gamers would steal something from their own gaming expierence and deny them something, when they really add to it and expand gaming as a whole. It reminds me a little of the console rivalry.
Thumbs up for the Futurama quote.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:32 am
I just realized that the Spoonerism for Molten Boron is Bolten Moron.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Because the male gamers who think female gamers would steal something from their own gaming experience are still stuck back at the emotional stage my brother was at when he was three and mom couldn’t give me, say, a balloon on my birthday without giving him one too. Because anything I got was something that had been taken away from him.
The little brother grew up and cut that shit out, but these gentlemen haven’t. It bodes so very well for the future of our species.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Hertza: I think it’s because game fans can only visit so many gaming sites a day. So if you’re going to Cerise, Shrub, or this site, that’s less time you’ll spend at Kotaku. When you see people from PALGN or most recently ComicBooksBin coming here and responding to our stories about what’s going on with their site with “why don’t you come over and talk about it at our place?” it’s because the more consolidated discussion is at their site, the more hits they get, which means they become more of an “authority,” which means the more money they get from advertisers. So Kotaku isn’t really in any hurry to rush to Cerise’s defense and point out that maybe the women wouldn’t have set it up if the commenters at Kotaku hadn’t been such enormous butt-sneezes.
This isn’t the first Futurama quote in the title of a post, btw.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Moira:
Yeah, it hurts the fanboy ego when outsiders invade your playground. I’m not surprised really. It’s probably the same kind of people who whine when a game previously exclusive to the PS3 comes out for the 360 as well.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Mighty Ponygirl:
Good point. Maybe this is just me, but aren’t the Kotaku people kinda chummy with Destructoid? I guess some competition is OK, just as long as long as it’s their own kind of people…
May 9th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Does anyone else get the impression that some of the Kotaku people think Cerise/Iris and other Feminist oriented places like it are strictly “no filthy, evil males allowed” eh? I certainly think some of the comments at Kotaku seem to allude this. Funny really since that has never actually happened to once. The only thing I have ever had to “cope” with is the fact that mens “issues” are, shock horror, not the top priority.
Guess for some folks at Kotaku thats just way too radical, and sounds like a wacked out crazy idea from some “bitches on the rag”. Or some shit like that.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:09 am
I think that Kotaku and Destructoid and Joystiq have an understanding that they aren’t really going to be able to muscle out the competition — they’re all more or less on the same level, with the same readers, and if they start getting snarky at one another, they don’t really stand to gain much. Gamespot, 1Up, and IGN are probably the same. Feministe and Feministing and Pandagon too. You might as well be friends, you like all the same people.
But for blogs like Shrub, Cerise, and Feminist Gamers, we’re smaller upstarts. We don’t swear fealty to Kotaku, and we’re not afraid to call them out on their bullshit, and we offer an alternative to a not-insignificant number of their readers should they get sick of the stupid, sexist throng there. I can’t imagine a scenario wherein Feminist Gamers becomes as ubiquitous as Kotaku or Joystiq, but our Technorati ranking has been improving by leaps and bounds since we started, and we don’t even have a flashy banner.
In other words, we are the competition, not places like Destructoid.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Wow, I never knew there was such a power struggle in these things, its like RTS factions or something. Cept its like, RLS.
Sorry, I was just playing Dawn of War yesterday……
May 9th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Sorry, I keep forgetting to keep the whole “I want to rule the world” thing under wraps. Uh, forget I said that. And, um, use the mind erasing device on yourself.
(”You mean the revolver, sir?”
“Yes.”)
May 9th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Does anyone else get the impression that some of the Kotaku people think Cerise/Iris and other Feminist oriented places like it are strictly “no filthy, evil males allowed” eh? I certainly think some of the comments at Kotaku seem to allude this.
Well that they should. I’m totally in favor of spaces that don’t allow for the filty, evil males. ;P
But, yeah. It’s crazy- if you act like, you know, a minimally decent human being, it doesn’t seem to matter what you’re packing in the gonad department, in my experience. Weird how that works.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
*stunned* That kid/cat analogy is so… on target. I mean, that’s EXACTLY it.
Or maybe it’s also like your kid does that to other kids and then you wonder why he never has any playdates.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
That joke with the German language class? That sounds almost word for word what I would hear from my classmates every single day in some of my (elective!) classes. They were dead set on making sure that the only thing we learned in World Mythology was that THEY! DIDN’T! CARE! and thus neither should anyone else.
May 10th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Ooooh, you had a World Mythology class??? I would’ve LOVED that. My HS sucked. Still sucks too.