wepon | Link Roundup March 2016

I’ve Had a Cyberstalker Since I Was 12

By now I was used to ignoring Danny’s harassment and advising others to do the same, but this was different, more serious than what I had endured before. It looked like Danny had stolen my identity and was now posing as me to my friends online. Had he hacked my accounts? I was terrified of the havoc he could wreak with my personal information suddenly at his disposal.

YAKUZA 3: PLAYED, REVIEWED AND FACT-CHECKED. WITH THE YAKUZA.

As a game for katagi (yakuza slang for "civilians" or "non-yakuza"), it's tremendous fun — but what do the yakuza think of this game? How do they rate it? I was able to get three reviewers from the major crime groups who do not want to be identified by their real name. (While yakuza fan magazines do exist and the yakuza are not a hidden part of Japanese society, due to recent crackdowns by the police, the "reviewers" here choose to remain anonymous.)

Nobody Cares About It But It’s The Only Thing That Matters: Pacing And Level Design In JRPGs

Level design seems to take a low priority in general for games criticism, especially for RPGs; it isn’t the only thing to talk about, obviously, and the script often rightly takes priority in many writers’ minds. That being said, I am less forgiving that discussion of level design is almost always overshadowed by discussion of battle design, because no matter how flashy and cool battle design is, it’s the pacing and level design that makes the difference between making a game tedious or fun! But maybe, just maybe, the interestingness of the turn-to-turn decisions of a JRPG are directly proportional to the pacing of those encounters and it might actually be possible that you can design a fascinating system and then immediately grind it into dust by forcing a player to do the same thing nine billion times in a row. Or, to be more specific, because no JRPG doesn’t make you do the same thing nine billion times in a row: pacing and level design are important because they are what make the combat-to-combat sequence variable and interesting such that the same encounters actually become meaningfully different from each other, and not tedious.

REPORT: 2016 Is the Most Dangerous Year for Transgender Americans

In all, HRC counts 44 bills targeting transgender people are in the works in 16 states. That’s more than twice as many as were introduced in all of 2015, and nearly two dozen of the measures focus on trans students.

Donald Trump and Reconstruction-Era Politics

Every era of racial progress engenders a racist backlash. The one that is still unfolding in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency bears a striking resemblance in tone to the reaction that swept the South after Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when former slaves were granted constitutional rights and black Americans served in interracial governments that came to power in the former Confederacy.

LIARS CHEATERS AND THIEVES: Why you should break every game you can get your grubby little hands on

To start, you can look at games as a collection of rules and systems. (There is a lot of contention on this topic, but it’s a good framework for this topic) Which items are useful in which scenarios, resource accumulation/scarcity, how quickly money can be acquired, how to interact with a character to make them like you — these are systems, collections of rules that dictate the ways you can engage with the game. And how you play the game is informed by these systems; playing a game is, more or less, working within these rules to achieve a desired effect.

Fuck Complete

Games that are more than ten hours long are — almost without exception — paced awfully. There is no possible way that a game can take into account the varied human contextual needs for pauses, breaks, interruptions, basic stuff like sanitation, over the course of three hours, even if they’re paced perfectly. Three times that length is even harder, and you start needing to think episodically, in the way a TV series does, about what happens when someone puts the controller down. Ups and downs, easy get outs. But 30 hours? Or more? You can’t sustain and maintain traditional linear storytelling that way — even if you keep the plot together, the pace collapses.

The Meme-ification of Misandry: Why ironic hatred of men isn’t enough

The most worthwhile and instructive aspect of misandry is its rejection of male approval. It flouts the notion that women should be deferential to men, that we should prioritize their comfort and pander to their egos. “Misandry is radical indifference to men,” explains Sarah Jeong, pointing to Mallory Ortberg’s definition. “It is radical because women are socialized to pay attention to all of those things, and to center men in their lives.” Beatrice, sex worker and mother of two boys, agrees: “It’s not man-hating as much as it is man-shrewdness: limiting relationships and interactions to things that nourish you. The twin pillars of misandry are not laughing at unfunny jokes, and walking out of bad sex. It’s made women’s standards higher, and created a new baseline of what deserves women’s attention.” Yet some think misandrist stances do center on men.

Why the poor pay more for toilet paper — and just about everything else

The world, in fact, is full of opportunities to save money — if you just have enough money to access them.

Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream: The dangerous culture of male entitlement and sexual hostility hiding within America's national parks and forests.

Szydlo’s task was to hunt for the Southwestern willow flycatcher, a tiny endangered songbird that historically had nested on the river but hadn’t been seen in three years. Her supervisor believed the bird was locally extinct, but Szydlo was determined to find it. The June expedition—a nine-day journey through the canyon on a 20-foot motorboat operated by a boatman named Dave Loeffler—would be her last chance that summer. When Szydlo asked a coworker what Loeffler was like, the reply was cryptic: “You’ll see.”

Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry

Of Afghanistan’s 15 million women, roughly 8 out of 10 live outside urban areas, where U.S. efforts to promote women’s rights have met with little success. Only 5 out of 100 graduate from high school, and most are married by age 16, 3 out of 4 in forced marriages. Young poets like Meena who call into the hot line, Amail told me, “are in a very dangerous position. They’re behind high walls, under the strong control of men.” Herat University’s celebrated young poet, Nadia Anjuman, died in 2005, after a severe beating by her husband. She was 25.

Flint Water Crisis Inquiry Finds State Ignored Warning Signs

An independent panel has concluded that disregard for the concerns of poor and minority people contributed to the government’s slow response to complaints from residents of Flint, Mich., about the foul and discolored water that was making them sick, determining that the crisis “is a story of government failure, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction and environmental injustice.”

Just one ally.

It's easy to judge people for seeing something horrible and not responding, but I think most of us have been there. We've been in that nail-biting state of being horribly distressed by what we saw, but unable to act in the moment--more afraid of making a fuss over nothing than about letting someone get away with something horrible. Sounds stupid when you spell it out. But it's a real state that humans are really subject to, and saying "well, don't do that" doesn't fix it.

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our ow as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions. In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology. So, I think my problem, and "our" problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.

Mansplaining, Manterrupting & Bropropriating: Gender Bias and the Pervasive Interruption of Women

As I wrapped up this study, one of the study’s male reviewers suggested another couple of additions to the new vocabulary based on what he has observed in meetings. I include them below for your consideration.
MANTERPRETATION: a man’s interpretation of something a woman says that is different than what she means but requires that she defends what she actually meant to say.

MANIMIZATION: a man’s minimization of a woman’s thoughts or ideas which, upon the man’s further reflection, leads to the man’s perception of the validity/intelligence of the thoughts or ideas which more often than not eventually leads to bropropriation.

How To Make A Plan To Write A Visual Novel In A Month So You Can Finish It In Three And A Half Months

Indie devs interested in making a concept for a game usually base their projects around seeing how much they can do with a single mechanic, and that’s actually how we wrote We Know The Devil: as the smallest implementation of a simple mechanic. We were able to figure out the structure and the word count of the project less than a week after deciding to do it, because we derived the structure from the mechanic, saw the scope of the project unfolding, and scaled it to something so reasonable that we actually had a chance of finishing it.