Today in “legislators are comically out of touch with how the world woks”, State Legislators in Pennsylvania put forth a bill that would add a 10% tax to any video game that receives a M for Mature or AO – Adult only rating from the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board). The state would then take that money and put into the “Digital Protection for School Safety account”…because you know, protect the children. Unfortunately, text doesn’t let me express just how big my eye-roll at reading this was.
Continue reading “Proposed PA legislation attempts to put ‘Sin tax’ on Video Games”Category: Culture
Culture is … hard to define. But as I spent 6 years studying rhetoric, media, and cultural theory — it’s pretty safe to say this stuff is probably related to communications theory stuff. Maybe.
Fear and Practice in 2018
I’ve attempted to write a blog post about the slaughter that happened over the weekend in Pittsburgh and how much it really shook me the core. The words to describe what I was feeling didn’t really resonate with me. Something about what I was trying to say just felt … off.
Continue reading “Fear and Practice in 2018”Nevertheless, I Persist.
Social media is drowning in misinformation and ideological war that many don’t even know we are fighting, even as they wade into ideological battle after ideological battle. Groups manipulate and subvert systems on social media to amplify their ideas, giving them a credibility they haven’t earned and don’t actually represent the will of the people. Death threats are common. Say the wrong thing, or say the right thing and the wrong person sees it and suddenly you are the target what can only be described as terrorist attack to silence you.
Twitter, it’s not me, it’s you.
After months of toxicity, complacence and what amounts to the implementation of “there are good people on both sides,” I quit Twitter. While there was a straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s something thats been building since about 2014. Twitter has been a corrupt, hateful, toxic place that generates Jack Dorsey money, and destroys our national dialog — not because of the format of Twitter, but the greed of the company.
Jessica Price and rage of the Reddit Mob
On July 5, 2018, Jessica Price, narrative designer for Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet was fired over a conversation she had on Twitter. The resulting fallout from that discussion, the Reddit Mob, and everything that’s come since has been a battleground for the discussion of women, sexism, and gaming.
Why I left the Church
Recently I was watching Season 2 of Queer Eye on Netflix, and it hit me with all the feels, and made me reflect on my own experiences with the Church. The episode, titled “God Bless Gay” follows the Fab 5 as remake Miss Tammy, a woman who’s given her whole life to her community and her Church. At the end of the episode, Miss Tammy launches into a sermon about love and acceptance and all the guys were sobbing, and I lost it. She is absolutely the best that Christianity has to offer.
An Explanation of ‘Video Games are Better without Stories’
Monday, I took my normal jaunt over to MassivelyOverpowered in the morning and picked up The Daily Grind, which is a daily a prompt about something in the news or video games or just something that came up in discussion elsewhere on the website. Monday’s prompt was about whether games, MMOs in specific, need story.
Continue reading “An Explanation of ‘Video Games are Better without Stories’”
Does Skinny Mei Matter?
Blizzard recently made a bit of an embarrassing mistake– Mei, a curvaceous Overwatch character was significantly skinnier in her new skins than she had been in previous iterations. Blizzard has already come out and said that that it was a bug and unintended and would be fixed in an upcoming patch. But of course that hasn’t stopped people from both sides of the proverbial fence from jumping up and down from how could Blizzard do this, to Blizzard is caving to the special snowflakes.