Failsplosion!

[tablesaw]

When I left work yesterday, the Internet seemed rather calm. I was away for a few hours because ojouchan and I went to hear Mozart at the Hollywood Bowl using my firm's box seats. And when I came back, there was crazy.

A whole bunch of racefail from various SF fandom cons popped up, as linkishly summarized by coffeeandink. I haven't even had a chance to look at the WriterCon issues, because I've been reconstruct my blown mind after the mindblowingly idiotic statements made by arhyalon. I expect that linkspam will be kicking into gear over it too.

Penny Arcade also took a dive into the "seduction community." Tycho offers some choice quotes like:

I'm fairly certain the purpose of this course is to make you a better predator of women. Check out their offers of "in-field training," as though you were going to hunt antelopes from a jeep in the Goddamned Savannah.

Gabe, on the other hand, apparently "decided to play devil's advocate" without doing a whole lot of research intot he topic, which was a bad idea. He finishes up saying

I'm a little worried that guys reading the site might take our discussion here as some sort of endorsement and I want to make sure that isn't the case. While some of their advice is probably fine I think the majority of it is really sleazy. Again, I can't blame guys for seeking out help. All joking aside though, I just want to make it clear that I don't think the seduction community is the place to go.

Emphasis mine, because although Tycho doesn't mention what started him down the rabbit hole, it may have been the recent massacre by George Sodini a deeply misogynistic man who regularly participated in "pick-up artist" seminars before taking two guns to a gym and then opening fire, killing three women and injuring nine before using the last bullet for himself.

Alas, a Blog has a collection of responses from "men's-rights activists, anti-feminists and other misogynists." (The original post includes a trigger warning for the quotes, and they are not for the faint of heart.) And these apologies for Soldini represent an extreme of Gabe's empathy. It's part of the reason, I try to divorce considering "intent" when it comes to things like this, because a person can ascribe a good intention or a seemingly reasonable justification to even the most heinous acts.

It's got me thinking about the nature of what "intention" is at all. Last year, adamcadre wrote about a psychological study investigating how we determine waht is intentional. I wrote a comment thinking about how intention intersects interactive fiction. In response, Adam wrote The Nemean Lion (Z-machine file, requires an IF interpreter to play), and I've been thinking about the last scene in this respect.

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Meanwhile, there's also conflict in the world of logic-puzzles, where puzzle plagiarism has reared its ugly head, with Conceptis Puzzles, purveyor of soulless, computer-generated, mass-produced logic puzzles, appropriated the concept and presentation of Strimko for their "new" feature Chain Sudoku. motris and onigame (constructors of the eagerly anticipated and soon-to-be-released Mutant Sudoku, a book of hand-crafted, soulful logic puzzles) have weighed in.

Yes, even Sudokuland is full of the fail. I'm going to bed.

Comments

[tablesaw]

Here from eljay.

Are you eviler there, perchance?

As for Gabe and Tycho -- as far as I can tell Gabe was just trying to be funny and put on his Gabe persona for a while and picked a bad time, and kind of an awful subject, to do it on?

That's probably the case for his first response (the one about "feminine wiles" and all that), but I'm more concerned with his overly empathizing with men in subsequent posts. He was very open about how his history with anxiety affected his gut reactions to the whole thing, but it's still overly focused on what men are "trying to do" in a what that obscures what they are actually doing. His instinct to see similarities between his path out of anxiety and depression (relying on friends for help and seeking psychiatric help in remedying a harmful chemical imbalance) and the "seduction community's" path (exploit and manipulate women to feel powerful) is troubling, and troublingly natural.

And certainly, the "seduction community" props up a social hierarchy that is harmful for men as well (to the financial benefit of the men at the top of that hierarchy). Gabe continues his final post with

I understand how badly you want to believe that there is a system out there that if you can simply master will resolve your problems. Sadly I don't think that's the case and if there is such a system, it certainly isn't this one.

But there's definitely a line between Gabe's empathy, which obscures the damage of the system, to the disgusting comments collected at Alas, a Blog, which seek to justify it. It's a long line in this case, but it's still there.