hoo-boy, I do not know.
I really don't know either. I'm not a computer gamer.
But I think that Gamergate seemed like a big deal at the time, and seems even more important in retrospect. It part because it made breitbart famous, and in part because those issues around identity and who (and how) people get punished for not fitting in feel like central cultural and political issues of the day.
in his parents' basement in coffee-stained sweatpants
That's not coffee.
I think Quinn makes a good point that it isn't about games. It's about integrity in journalism US culture. Bouie is sadly correct about the actual nature of political correctness in this country.
This seemed like the thread in which to ask that question.
You should not have told me that exists.
Civ 6, not the Bouie piece, which I already skimmed.
The further away you get from the 1950s sitcom dad, the more people there are out there that hate you.
I'm not sure this is accurate. I think the issue is being further away from the 1950s sitcom data and having power or influence. You can be different. You just can't be different on the boss of one of those types who worries about ethics in video game journalism.
"I want to be the Oscar Wilde of games"
> look
You are in the left luggage office of Victoria Station.
> inv
You have:
a handbag
a perambulator
> put handbag on counter
Done. The clerk takes the handbag and puts it on the shelf behind him, giving you a small cardboard ticket.
>s
Victoria Station.
The crowds bustle about you and the air is thick with smoke and steam. The Left Luggage Office is to the north.
>inv
You have:
a perambulator
a left luggage ticket
>get baby
You don't have a baby.
> look in perambulator
There is a three-volume novel in the perambulator.
> get baby
You don't have a baby.
> get baby
You don't have a baby.
> get baby
You don't have a baby.
> flee
You board a train to the country town of Woolton and seek employment as a governess.
THE CUCUMBER SANDWICH IS A LIE
"I want to be the Oscar Wilde of games"
I tried to make sense of this, but all I could come up was that she wants to be persecuted.
13: Sorry! Let me try that again.
I tried to make sense of this, but all I could come up with was that she wants to be persecuted.
Or die of TB. That's coming in back into vogue.
The Wilde-ism that came to mind was the one about the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about, but in fact what she said was "I want to be the Oscar Wilde of games, and just toss out something weird while atop a throne of boys". Classy.
Classy.
I chuckled at it.
But her point was that it's an example of how much her life has changed that she used to be able to make a joke like that on twitter, but now that wouldn't even be possible.
I don't think you could describe Wilde's plays and poems as weird, though. She seems to have this idea of Wilde as being an outsider figure writing stuff that only a tiny minority of people appreciated, which is 100% not true. Wilde was the EA or Blizzard of his day.
Zoe Quinn is awesome and has had to put up with too much shit. If she can commercialize the experience--via her book, and her collaboration with, of all people, Chuck Tingle--good for her. I mostly agree with her, but gaming culture has amplified some aspects of toxic masculinity found in the larger culture.
19: I didn't read the interview in any detail, but I figured she picked Wilde because she wants to queer things up.
Re: Civ 6: Enh, I dunno. It is very much in the mold of Civ 5 of being more boardgamey than early Civs. It's pretty, but in a different way; a little more cartoonish and colorful than the art deco-inspired Civ 5, but not to the degree that Civ Revolutions were. I haven't played it that much since the launch but I felt like it was a bit better at letting cities feel distinct from each other. I also recall it feeling slower than Civ 5.
Most of my strategy game time is now in Paradox Interactive's various games (Crusader Kings, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, and Victoria, roughly in order of how much time I put into them). Horrid time sinks.
Speaking of gamergate, did you all see this gem from saiselgY?
(I know I should know this, but what's the etiquette here for when you post a comment to the wrong thread? Repost in the right thread? Just leave it in the other thread? Spend the day repenting with prayer and fasting?)
That's good enough to be in two threads.
The thing not obvious from that picture is that the dude was armed, I believe with two pistols. It's clear which of the people in that picture has balls.
The thing is, Gamergate wasn't because of games. Games were really an afterthought.
It definitely wasn't because of games, but I don't think you can say games were an afterthought either. There's something about gaming culture, specifically current online gaming culture among the teen to mid 20s set, which has inculcated and made a core part of the identity the sort of aggressive-defensive resentment out of which Gamergate and the Milo wing of Trumpism sprang. You can see it right now in the response to Pewdiepie's latest racism incident, where an indie developer is subject to a concerted campaign simply for saying "Actually, we don't want you making money off our game while using racial slurs". Everything which doesn't cater to their toxic masculinity is an existential threat which must be eliminated.
It's got to the stage that these fucking idiots are making it impossible for decent people to make a living, because the commercial interests aren't interested in making fine distinctions, they just see "gamer" and say "Nope". Literally. One of the things Youtube lets advertisers refuse to display ads against is gaming content. And it's going to have worse consequences in the long run. Gamers and developers have withstood political onslaughts in the past under the shield of the first amendment, but there are going to be many fewer defenders if the public face of gaming is a bunch of idiots screaming racial and misogynist abuse.
22: oh that's marvelous. Especially the video.
I have definitely posted this before, but I can't find the earlier comment: Max Read writing in New York magazine about the demise of Gawker:
That fall, Gamergate began waging a hugely annoying, and sometimes genuinely menacing, war against Kotaku. I personally came to the attention of Gamergate in October 2014, not for a fearless act of journalism, but because I was messing around on Twitter and I stepped in it. Sam Biddle, one of Gawker's best and most notoriously aggressive writers, had tweeted that the lesson of Gamergate was that nerds should be bullied into submission; this in turn led to a flood of tweets and emails to me demanding that he be disciplined; I responded in a mode that seemed appropriate: I goaded and dismissed and largely treated the people complaining with a great deal of contempt and flippancy.
In retrospect: This was extremely stupid. . . . What I'd missed about Gamergate was that they were gamers -- they had spent years developing a tolerance for highly repetitive tasks. Like, say, contacting major advertisers.
On Reddit, a campaign was launched to contact every advertiser Gamergaters could find on Gawker's site -- and not just the marketing departments of advertisers like Adobe and BMW, but specific executives. If you can bug a chief marketing officer, it doesn't matter that your complaints are disingenuous: He just wants to stop being annoyed.
I have thought about this many times since I read it: the fundamental disconnect between people who don't see how those games could be fun or rewarding, and those who do.
If you can bug a chief marketing officer, it doesn't matter that your complaints are disingenuous: He just wants to stop being annoyed.
I think people fail to appreciate the importance of this when it comes to our failed media. Editors of publications in difficult financial straits find themselves dealing constantly with rightwing idiots. Before publishing a story that offends nitwits, editors have to think: Is this worth the time I'm going to have to spend responding to nitwits?
It is gratifying to me that we are starting, finally, to see some serious pressure on the media from the left. I'm usually all for moderation and prudence when it comes to criticism, but I really think that anybody who hassles the media is performing a service if their gripe -- no matter how stupid -- comes from a leftist perspective.
All the leftists who want to bitch about Bernie or Obama or Hillary need to instead be calling up editors and producers at the New York Times or CNN.
26: I doubt livestreaming as a profession is going away, even with DRM pulldowns. (I respect what Campo Santo did, but it's bad precedent.) There's too much interest there. Gaming is too big now. Although I am suspicious of anyone who identifies as a "gamer;" at this point I think that's as sensible to self-describe as a "television watcher" and is best left to the reactionaries.
28: I don't think that quote is inconsistent with finding games rewarding, even those with repetitive tasks (see above). They really can train you to shut your brain off for a quick task-reward-task loop. You can also interact with them at deep levels. As with most things in life, most but not all people will do both at different times.
Oh, hey, look, a nerd extremely awful human being being toxically shitty, in real time. Geek culture really does have its own problems distinct from society at large.
It's like he's never even heard of Exalted Cyclopses.
But if you want a stupid title and to be less horrible, you can be a Free Mason.
Unless you're Catholic or something.
That's just fucking mortifying. I could probably forgive someone under the age of 8 for that thought, but "geek culture as permanent immaturity" inspires a special kind of inner suffering. (Same for masculinity as permanent immaturity, internet feminism as permanent immaturity, et seq.)
I don't really feel any special connection to or responsibility for the fucked-up-ed-ness of young nerds. I have enough problems like that with more numerous demographic groups.
34: Knights of Columbus! I mean, sure, whenever they make the news I'm usually pissed at whatever they're doing, but I'm an atheist and hence irrelevant. One of their ranks is "Faithful Navigator!" All titled ranks get to wear both a cape and a chapeau, each in a rank-specific color.
And if he really wants those titles but doesn't want to put in the work of joining an arguably useful social organization, there's always, y'know, literally playing D&D. Or LARPing.
My dad's dad had a sword someone gave him in case he advanced to the ranks where you wear a sword.
||
Has anyone here seen The Trip to Spain?
I have a question about it.
I didn't get a chance to see it, Barry, but is it about the ending I inadvertently had spoiled?
33,37:
H.L. Mencken was already on this bask in the day:
For years the old tradition served to keep the military bosom bare of millinery, but all the while the weakness for baubles was working its wicked will upon the civil population. Rank by rank, they became Knights Pythias, Odd Fellows, Red Men, Masons, Knights Templar, Elks, Moose, Woodmen--and in every new order there were thirty-two degrees, and for every degree there was
a badge, and for every badge there was a yard of ribbon, and for every yard of ribbon there was a bushel of spangles.
There is an undertaker in Hagerstown, Md., who belongs to eighteen orders, all knightly, all splendiferous. When he robes him-self to plant a fellow joiner he weighs three hundred pounds and sparkles and flashes like the mouth of hell itself.
He is entitled to bear seven swords, all jeweled, and to hang his watch chain with the golden busts of nine wild animals, all with rubies for eyes. Put beside this lowly washer of the dead, Pershing newly polished would seem almost like a Trappist. ...
It is but I missed where you had inadvertently spoiled it.
Also I guess I want it on the record that I spent the whole day at the ER with a child who needed to be checked out EVEN THOUGH I knew it was my last chance to see The Trip to Spain in matinee hours and that it had been the only day that week without a conflicting appointment. Never let anyone say I don't suffer for art, just maybe not successfully or in the right ways.
Loved the reviews that said it was the only movie franchise that matters.
43: Sorry, other kind of "had spoiled." I read some stupid conservative thing approving of how the ending shows the real danger of libertine lives and how we're all going to be destroyed.
I'm wondering if that was cut from what is screening in Arrakis (which usually just censors for nudity/sex) or whether people are seeing what they expect to see because I saw something very different.
It hinges on whether the truck was still in the distance.
1: I followed GamerGate pretty closely as it happened, but at the time it seemed like something happening in a bubble that would never have any impact out of a certain small circle. It was obvious horrible for Zoe Quinn and the other victims, but I thought it was a small pathological group of nerds. There are Harry Potter shipping wars and Steven Universe fan art wars that have also spilled over into real-world harassment, and I thought it was the same genre of phenomenon.
It seemed of so little systematic importance that I think I went a year before I asked my wife if she'd heard of it. (I generally keep "people acting badly on the internet" stories to myself, since she already sees her fair share in her own circles.) And yet now it seems like a turning point in history. I'm sure at the time I would have thought the clowns arrested in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch were of no historical importance either.
They were basically Ludendorf/Kaiser shippers.
49: does this explicit discussion of the ending clarify? I'm guessing you saw it all.
52 No it doesn't. I saw a pickup truck in the distance full of a bunch of djellaba wearing dudes from the sticks in the bed of the truck. Not at all out of place for where he was and something certainly likely to elicit an expression of horror (he'll have to climb in with them to make it to the next town). What I didn't see was a bunch of balaclava wearing IS jihadists shouting Allahu Akbar!
Though that's what's been reported as the ending. I suspect people are seeing what they've been trained to expect, unless they censored the ending here.
28: There's a reddit copypasta of a gamer boasting that they would win because they like repetitive tasks. It's simultaneously embarrassing to read, and terrifying.
The closest theater showing it is a 2-hour drive because of stupid Ohio construction, so I'll be no good to you. Sorry! I did wonder after the first review if the viewer was reading too much into it as you suggest, but shrug.
Cassandane bought Quinn's book. Neither of us have read it yet but we plan to.
I have to consider myself a gamer in some sense, I recently estimated that I play World of Warcraft 12-15 hours a week which is more than I watch TV, but I definitely agree with the hive mind here about Gamergate and the alt-right.
26
It's got to the stage that these fucking idiots are making it impossible for decent people to make a living, because the commercial interests aren't interested in making fine distinctions, they just see "gamer" and say "Nope". Literally. One of the things Youtube lets advertisers refuse to display ads against is gaming content.
Maybe this is a dumb question, but what do you mean? I ask because my first thought about Gamergate is that the gaming industry itself is somewhat resistant to Gamergate, just because it's an industry. Gamergate is a real problem for indie developers, small businesses trying to get big and stuff, but Ajay mentioned EA and Blizzard upthread. Those are billion-dollar companies. They don't just want the toxic-masculinity-twenty-something-male demographic, they want soccer moms joining their kids and 12-year-olds being allowed to play unattended and people starting their games in their 20s and sticking with them well into their 40s. They'll rarely go out of their way to be progressive but standing up loud and proud for/with Gamergaters would be bad for their image.
Or so I assumed based on little evidence besides my own experience, but maybe my faith in the power of corporate America doing the right thing is misplaced. Hmmm.
I thought GY was referring to the people who make money with gaming videos and livestreams and the like. Not having ads, or having fewer ads, on material identified as "gaming-related" hurts their odd little business model.
(This is one of those corners of the Internet that I mostly just don't understand. Some of the money there helps pay my salary, but I still don't understand it).
50 last: At risk of tempting fate, I don't think that works. Gamergaters enjoy repetitive tasks. Brownshirts enjoyed killing people. Think how an actual Nazi would have acted in the situation in 22.
All Nazis that size were in charge of the Luftwaffe, so probably would have bombed her until British fighters started killing his bombers at faster than replacement rates.
That guy isn't half the man Göring was.
Further, I'm pretty sure Trump isn't the Hitler of this story, he's the Wilhelm II: a profoundly weak and incompetent heir covering with performative masculinity.
That does make sense. Also, incompetent hair.
Tragedy, farce, you know how it goes.
31: Oh, fuck, Damore's a troll. Everyone who thought that was right and I was wrong. He's not part of the tiny minority who believes in discourse, he's part of the somewhat larger group who are either trolling that tiny minority to shore up bullshit scapegoating games, or pretending to do so because of path-dependency. I should have basically expected this on priors, but I was actually unsure. It's possible that he was transformed into a troll by his firing, IDK, I guess that happens.
That asshole was the guy Google fired?
66: Yep. Seems like a good call at this point.
Skimmed a bunch of shit. But going off
The further away you get from the 1950s sitcom dad, the more people there are out there that hate you.
and number 8,
Iris Marion Young wrote that there is a default person in the West (white, male, N. European, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, etc), who automatically commands respect. The further you are from the ideal, the more work you have to put in to command respect. That doesn't meant that you can't command respect without those qualities, nor that you can't have all those traits and not be respected, but the further you are, the *more* you have to do, and the closer you are, the easier it is to be taken seriously. I've found that a very useful way to think about these issues. (In my terminology, we talk about marked and unmarked, and there is a constellation of unmarked 'default' categories, and deviation from those make things harder.) Gamer gate is a very naked expose of the extent to which deviation from the white male norm means that respect is not automatic or granted, in a way that was particularly vicious.
65: Going onto Stefan Molyneux's show didn't cause you to revisit your priors that he was an earnest if socially inept seeker after the truth?
That's the tiny minority who believes in discourse the disingenuous right-wing suggestion that we need to re-litigate everything, right down to whether black people or women are human, every time anyone expresses some uncertainty about it.
70
Yep. Somehow whether black people are human is back on the table of polite discourse. To point out it's not is rude and hysterical. And never ever suggest that someone who thinks it's open for debate might be racist. That's just beyond the pale.
And yes to the women bit too. Harvard should probably convene a panel to debate, "do women have souls?"
73
I'm just drunk enough for inhibitions to be lowered. I need to watch it.
This is hilarious on that Damore troll
Further, I'm pretty sure Trump isn't the Hitler of this story, he's the Wilhelm II: a profoundly weak and incompetent heir covering with performative masculinity.
The similarities are really disturbing. In this analogy, Obama is Edward VII; the effortlessly cool and popular rival who Trump is both desperate to emulate and intent on destroying. The Kaiser didn't tweet but he wrote irritable notes in the margins of state papers. And of course withered arm/ tiny hands.
Except I thought that GWB was Wilhelm II at the time. He makes a pretty good fit, too; and he inherited an empire in better shape than Trump did
GWB wasn't the sharpest, but by all accounts sharper than Trump, and actually compis mentis, which WII and Trump clearly weren't and aren't.
And of course the UK is Austria, a close ally linked by a common language, with an elderly and much respected monarch who is going to be replaced by someone worse, whose polity is progressively destabilised by the effort of keeping station on Trump/Bush/Willy's manoeuvring.
Awesome.
79: And Austria used to be pretty high on the sun-never-sets scale, as these things go.
51: Wins the thread.
there is a default person in the West (white, male, N. European, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, etc), who automatically commands respect.
And that person is David Attenborough.
Related, since Quinn's first big game was about depression: anyone taken Abilify? My doctor says my insurance company won't approve Rexulti until I've tried Abilify first, so he's starting me on 2mg/day (in addition to the Pristiq) I already take.
With a name like "Abilify" how could it not make you more able?
I like Pristiq. That alluring sweet spot between prestige and mystique.
Or it's a mishearing of Pritt-Stick.
My favorite is still Effexor, related to Pristiq. Effexor is clearly helping Megatron do whatever it is Megatron does to protect the all spark.
Rexulti, meanwhile, is clearly the title of a contentious encyclical issued by one of the Renaissance Popes.
"Ask your confessor if Laudabiliter is right for you. Side effects may include plantations."
Just a year ago I would not have gotten the joke in 85. Simpler times.
I thought Damore was a troll from the beginning, but I have to admit I don't understand why it's his Grand Wizard tweet that's done him in publicly. If a comedian had said it, I would have had zero reaction to it.
Because his schtick in the letter was soberly intellectual 'just asking questions', maybe tone-deaf about how someone might possibly take the questions as pushing an agenda. Once he's making 'clever' little trollish jokes, it wrecks that persona.
I still don't get the joke in 85. Simpler mind.
The All Spark is like the Transformers' god.
If people like peep don't learn to respect the religious views of other people and other people trucks, America will never come together.
Like Sherlock Holmes and whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa*, I'm happy that I have failed to remember google-asshole's name. I hope to keep it up.
* I do think it worth remembering the answer to the sun-earth thing, if only for history of science purposes.
82: My wife has taken Abilify and Rexulti, as adjunct treatments for depression, alongside SSRIs and SNRIs. Abilify was great when she started it - it helped her a lot, she had more energy, took up a couple of hobbies, and so on. The effect didn't last, and about a year later as part of trying to improve and shake things up again she switched to Rexulti. Not obviously different, really, but she did try some time between without either one, and that seemed to confirm that they were helping and it's the depression, unfortunately, that is worse, rather than the drug effect fading.
as adjunct treatments for depression
We need tenure-track treatments here.
I'm sad and tired. Make me laugh.
I don't have anything funny but I do have a complaint/request for advice if that's of interest.
I hope the mineshaft proves more lucrative for you than for I.
Eh, it's pretty low stakes. Adult/academic friendship stuff. Which means I'll/she'll be moving on soon anyway so no need to put a lot of work in.
96: I have this awful comedy routine in my head that goes like this:
If you drink hot water because it's good for healthy but you won't heat your apartment, you just might be a nongmin.
If your scooter has more avian passengers than human, you might be a nongmin...
If you dry your larou next to your underwear, you might could be a nongmin.
If you've ever attempted to pay for KFC with produce, etc...
I was going to make a meme of it, but there's no Chinese guy that looks like Jeff Foxworthy and it's not worth it anyhow.
Question first, how do I become less friendly with someone when I really want to tell them off?
It's a kind of tough time for me now (winding down a post-doc with no job on the horizon (not just no academic, nothing at all). My friend and fellow post-doc got a TT job but she thinks she could do better. When we hang out, she complains about the job location and the students and her singleness and the lack of dating options. I've tried to get her to see the positives of her situation, told her it won't be as bad as she's imagining (as a person who went to a school very similar to the one she's going to and met my now-husband there), and talked with her about leaving in a couple years.
But now I'm just totally tired of the whole thing. She's being totally oblivious about my situation and background and I'm tired of trying to cajole her into feeling better when I'm trying not to panic about my own situation. I don't want her help or sympathy (I'm pretty bad about feeling comfortable about getting those from people), I just want her to shut the fuck up and feel grateful for what she has.
So, should I (a) tamp down my emotions until I have a little too much to drink and tell her off; or (b) stop hanging out with her, made difficult by the fact we share an office, CSA, hobby, and friends?
All this is not helped by not really counting her as a true friend (more of a friendly colleague) and our mutual friend also being mad at her for trying to academically one-up said friend.
Blah, sorry. As I said, not a good time for me (I can't get my code right either!).
Huh. My first reaction is to go straight for stabbing her, but there are downsides to that. I'll think of something less likely to lead to legal consequences.
Thinking outside the box, why don't you passive-aggressively taunt her for being single and suggest it's a personal failing on her part?
Oooh, yes. Sympathizing worriedly about how impossible dating will be and what a shame it is that her professional success has doomed her to a lifetime alone could be very satisfying.
Ask her how she feels about cats.
105: I mean, it's hard not to play the smug-married. Plus her luck in this town has not been good and I think this town has to be one of the best places ever to date-and-settle-down (as opposed to date-and-sleep-around), especially for a smart woman.
But I assume she deep-down feels that and she's taking it out weirdly leading to this whole situation.
Would it be possible to go for (c)? Next time she starts complaining, tell her in a friendly, neutral way, hey I know things didn't work out the way you wanted, but I am pretty freaked out about my own situation, can we just cool it, because you're stressing me out. If she's very touchy she may take offense, but it sounds like you don't care very much, and your office situation and mutual friends won't be jeopardized because your behavior will not have been objectively bad.
I just want her to shut the fuck up and feel grateful for what she has.
I'm in favor of bringing it up forthrightly, but from the above I think first you need to disentangle your feelings about two things: her problems, and how she expresses them to you. She is allowed to personally feel discontent even if her situation is objectively much better than yours, and if you say something that makes it sound like those feelings are inappropriate / disallowed (as the above selection could be read), that will make for a pretty unproductive conversation. The tone should be "I'm dealing with problems A, B, and C, and when you vent about D, E, and F, those are such different-scale problems that it's hurtful, so please think before you speak."
And if you have a productive conversation that is still a bit on the curt side, and explicitly includes something like "I'm not asking for your support/sympathy, just some quiet on these particular subjects", that might help with your 103.5 problem.
Suggest a threesome. Or rather a menage a trois. That way, if she says yes, your financial situation will improve dramatically (because she'll be talking on a lot of the household expenses), as will her dating situation, and if she says no she'll be so freaked out that she'll never speak to you again. There is literally no way that this plan can go wrong.
I have mentioned to her that I don't have a lot of sympathy for her at the moment given my situation (but like in the nice 'female' way like 'Oh, hey, you probably don't mean it like this but...). I'm not sure it's worked because I haven't really hung out with her since.
My current annoyance was brought on by her and my other office mate discussing whether it made fiscal sense for friend to buy a house in new town when she's only staying there for a short time (i.e. until she can find something better).
I might have reached 'bitch eating crackers' stage.
108: That's exactly what I was thinking of.
I don't understand what this has to do with eating crackers, unless you're implying she'll have to be a lesbian, redneck prostitute if she wants companionship.
Which, if you are, suggests I don't need to give you tips on interpersonal cruelty.
I wasn't familiar with the phrase "bitch eating crackers" until this thread. Urban Dictionary to the rescue.
As far as what to do, when she complains about the new job location, you could enthusiastically agree with her.
I prefer to use my own mind as the reference.
The Urban Dictionary doesn't go back to the source, which was one of those images that pairs an olde image with contemporary text. I'm not finding it, but it had an angelic sweet toddler eating crackers and the text "Look at that bitch eating crackers like she owns the place."
I think the origin is the DWIL community on BabyCenter. At least it's in their glossary.
That's where I first saw it. But they referenced the postcard with the image. It is a handy concept.
It's fascinating, isn't it, how academia is full of emotionally stunted cretins and self-serving delusions are part of the package deal of the life of the mind? I have no useful advice. It's also fascinating how bitter I am given the extraordinary lengths I thought I'd gone to in order to avoid bitterness.
Also, yes, Google made the right call in firing Damore. It's one thing to subsidize the guy doing this with 20% of his time; it's another thing to subsidize the guy taking 20% of everyone else's time.
Will be great? I know you're in another time zone but I didn't know they worked like that
Though I have high hopes for
134.last
Great. Now we're all under pressure. And 134 is only 6 comments away.
103 I don't want her help or sympathy (I'm pretty bad about feeling comfortable about getting those from people), I just want her to shut the fuck up and feel grateful for what she has.
The wanting her to shut the fuck up is understandable; the wanting her to feel grateful for what she has seems possibly kind of pernicious. Academia has this way of telling people they should be happy with a job they hate in a town they hate. Someone I know turned down a faculty job offer in a country he didn't really want to move to, where his wife would have trouble getting a job, and has had to put up with several months of almost everyone he runs into telling him how stupid he is. It's really a weird aspect of the culture that people get berated for saying no to a job they don't want.
OT: Isn't this guy's haul above average, even if you don't subset bank robbers by stupidity of their facial hair?
129.last: It's not that weird, is it? Your advisor gets judged by the jobs his students get and doesn't have to actually live in Carbondale or whatever.
129: I definitely understand the push to be happy about all situations in academia. I've personally made the decision not to apply to any more jobs in places I don't want to live or work my ass off in hopes of a TT job which will probably be in one of those places and make my life not what I want in the meantime. But note that I did say I wanted her to be grateful, rather than happy. I don't expect her to be happy about the location (though I do about the job since it's pretty sweet with loads of start-up, low teaching, international connections, and what sound like great colleagues). I actually wish that, given her comments before and after the interview, during the offer negotiations, and since, that she'd just turned it down and went on the market again next year.
The situation pushes up against my 'make the best of a bad situation' personal motto. Not to mention what I hope is a general 'don't go into a teaching job thinking all your students are idiots who couldn't get into a better school' motto.
Academia is like selling Amway and Carbondale is a basement full of mediocre laundry detergent purchased from a neighbor.
129 People get offered jobs they didn't apply for?
Anyway, hydro, I think you can probably be passive-aggressive here and give as little response to the complaints as humanly possible, or try to pointedly change the subject, or cultivate an air of abstraction and aloofness that puts her on her guard when she's looking for emotional crutches. But if there's not much else you're getting out of the friendship, it may be more difficult to focus on the productive parts of it. I don't have a lot of social skills, but cooling people off is something I'm fairly good at, and it's handy.
And while I'm a big gratitude skeptic in general, I don't get the sense of entitlement that leads people to complain bitterly and vociferously about things that are just overrated rather than being actively bad. But the special combination of power disparities and obliviousness in academia is actively bad.
How much longer do you have to put up with her? Oh, and good luck to you. I don't know whether or not you're in my hometown, but the job market there is shit and I'm perpetually grateful to have gotten out. (Apart from this year's weird, gnawing homesickness.)
69: I hadn't been paying a lot of attention, he didn't seem all that interesting.
70, 71: Bullshit. A small average difference in measured distribution of various human traits, on tests designed for humans, where you shouldn't even expect to notice a clear difference if you're not looking at the far tail, is not remotely plausibly an argument that one group is not human, for any commonsense construal of "not human." Nor is that sort of argument what motivates a substantial fraction of the white US population to basically be fine with cops murdering black people, and opposed to government spending iff they think it will benefit black people.
Or what motivates Google to pay women less, for that matter.
Or what motivates Uber to structure itself as a massive sexual harassment machine.
138-140: So why do you think they do those things?
Actually, I was wrong, it's not bullshit, it's just starting from the unstated premise that arguments are always fake, at least on the right. The conclusion follows from the preference. Sorry, that premise is hard for me to remember, because I'm in the group being successfully trolled. Oops!
141: On race, most charitable interpretation I can think of is that they don't perceive public speech content as directly informative, don't trust themselves to make sense of national discourse, expect that believing arguments will just lead to having resources extracted from them by clever arguers, so they fall back on the easy-to-implement heuristic of allying with people who seem like them based on easy-to-identify hard-to-fake physical traits & cultural signifiers, against a similarly identifiable other. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans know how to milk that strategy too, so they're fucked.
On sex, maybe patriarchy is an organizing principle of our society & will continue to be, despite some good mitigating efforts, until a full refactoring happens. There are other things that determine relative incidence - for instance, Uber has a basically predatory aesthetic & gets funding because of it. Google is subtler & probably does no worse than baseline.
But baseline has lots of unfairness built in.
Sorry, but is the "they" in 143 Uber, Google, white racists, all three? By "the group being trolled" in 142 do you mean sensible right-wingers?