Nobody Expects the Hollywood Inquisition!

Well. Almost nobody. It was bound to happen eventually. 

Well, it's been an interesting few weeks for me. After being in isolation for so long, my immune system was woefully unprepared for exposure to the outside world and I promptly caught a cold. I'm getting over it, slowly but surely.

I was pleasantly surprised by both Thor: Ragnarok and Assassin's Creed: Origins, both coming from franchises with shaky previous entries. The former was a refreshingly fun entry that may as well have been another Guardians of the Galaxy film, but I can't help but feel that humans have been a bad influence on Thor. The latter came after a break from the yearly release cycle of the series and cribs shamelessly from other great games in what ends up being an actually really good game. And on Black Friday, I picked up Subject Delta from Bioshock 2 from my local shop. He'd been sitting there for probably 2 years, tantalizingly out of my price range, until the big sale came and he was 60% off, putting him back at his original retail price, if not less.

Forget your flat screens and 200 dollar laptops, I got Mr Bubbles!

I suppose I can only stall talking about this for so long, so let's go.

Following the aftermath of the #MeToo campaign, it feels like one in every three or four famous men in Hollywood has been accused of some form of sexual misconduct, starting with Harvey Weinstein (Clinton campaign donor, once referred to by Michelle Obama as 'a wonderful human being') and sucking in anyone in its path and spitting them out all over the headlines of progressive websites everywhere.

I've thought long and hard about whether or not I should say this, but I'm going to: Look, we all know how left-leaning Hollywood is. So left-leaning it's fallen off the table and made a mess all over the floor that no one wants to clean up. The current state of the allegation game leads me to no other conclusion than that it's little wonder that progressives believe there is a rape culture in America, because just look at the type of men they surround themselves with.

See, you can be an asshole. I'm an asshole. But when you strut around in your coastal elite circles condemning anyone who thinks differently or even lives in a zip code too far away from New York or Los Angeles, I'm no longer surprised when you're outed as a sexual predator. I'm watching my progressive friends fall apart, like they've got that scene from Revenge of the Sith playing on loop shouting "You were the chosen one!" every time another Joss Whedon or Vice writer gets outed as a complete scumbag. I'm just sitting here doing a half-hearted imitation of Paul Joseph Watson saying "Imagine My Shock" and  remembering all the entertainment sex scandal rumours and fundamentalist hypocrites I spent the first half of my life paying attention to and bringing up to the discomfort of the masses that idolized them.


See, I like assholes.

Stop that, that's not what I meant and you know it. 

But I do like assholes. Assholes are rude, sarcastic, sometimes aggressive, but by god they're honest. If you meet an asshole, you have nowhere to go but up: they might genuinely be an asshole and you know what you can expect; or they might have been hurt too many times and are deep down a good person but react poorly because of what they've lived through. But if you meet a saint, you're gambling that they are what they appear to be, and history and experience has taught me that the better someone appears, the more potential for disappointment they provide you.

Think I'm wrong? The crown jewel in the Good People's Club of modern social media, George Takei has had his name run through the muck. What's even better was his reaction-- not only did he break the cardinal rule of denying allegations, he also went on to blame Russia for inflating the claims. I swear he could run for DNC Candidate for President at this point.

Then, with Al Franken's allegations, some people seemed to lose all semblance of self-awareness, afraid that they'd target too many of their own tame white men that the evil white men would be left in charge. The Gamergate Where Are They Now List got a few more new entries. Cognitive dissonance flew wild when one of Lena Dunham's friends was accused, and she tried to defend him.

Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don't lie about: rape.

— 💎 Lena Dunham 💎 (@lenadunham) August 4, 2017

Life comes at you fast, eh Lena?

Anyway, where am I going with all this? It's simple: be you. Whether you're a bleeding heart liberal or staunchly conservative, whether you call it being self-righteous or virtue-signalling, stop. Just be you. Don't try and portray yourself as a saint because I wasn't buying it to begin with, and fewer and fewer people are buying it every day. I never trusted a saint to begin with, and it seems a lot of people are starting to feel my way.

That said, I've got 50 to 1 odds that Chris Evans, sterling paragon of Goodness and Captain America himself, is up for an allegation inside of the month. Contact me if you want to place bets. After all, if Wonder Woman isn't safe, who is?

Actually, It's About Ethics in Electoral Integrity

I feel very, very confused right now.

I grew up during the tail end of the Cold War and, being in a military family, moved around a lot. The escalating tensions between the US and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies wasn't easy to understand by us kids living on-base, but I could tell something was wrong from the stress in people's faces as they watched the news. This tension only increased when we moved to West Germany -- which shared a border with East Germany, a an ally of the Soviets. 

Despite this, I went through a rebellious phase where I identified as Communist, Marxist, etc. After studying history, I eventually realized that those systems would never work in reality because human nature would not allow it. After all, someone had to make sure production went out from each according to their abilities and came back to each according to their needs, and in that accountable person's mind, their need is always going to be greater than that of the people in the bread line.

On a totally unrelated note, Fidel Castro is dead. Many people call him a 'divisive' figure, which I'm choosing to translate as "We're just to the right of Stalin, so we dare not criticize Castro too heavily lest we be cast out." Seeing as how I've cast myself out of progressive circles, I'm not going to worry too much about it and just call it like I see it: Castro was a brutal dictator who overthrew another brutal dictator who overthrew another brutal dictator. I also feel sympathy for people living in Cuba, and totally understand someone wanting to leave. I especially feel for those who were shot at as they fled the country. This entire situation reminds me of a particularly powerful scene that I can't quite put my finger on...

Oh, wait, that's it.

What bothers me here isn't the Ctrl-Left pseudo-marxists who are mourning Castro
s death -- like them, I would have expressed a similar sentiment at a different point in my life. No, I'm bothered by the sitting Prime Minister who referred to Castro as a 'revolutionary and great orator.' That worries me a little. But what worries me more is Dr Jill Stein.

Dr. Jill Stein, who ran on the Green Party platform and has a folk band. Dr. Jill Stein, who is calling for a recount in several states and has a crowd-funding campaign to back it. One that has apparently missed the deadline for Pennsylvania, so there's that gone.

Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) November 27, 2016

Dr. Jill Stein is demanding recounts in favour of Hillary Clinton while praising someone who was 'President' in one form or another for 47 years. She's demanding Electoral Integrity while praising someone who, as far as I can tell, never had to face re-election because there were no elections for his position. Correct me if I'm wrong on this

Jill. what are you doing? Why are you collecting money from people who are tapped out from supporting you and Bernie and Hillary, then missing deadlines for the one state that mattered, and then praising someone with a reputation for firing squads, reducing rations, and cutting electricity to his people for 16 hours a day while having a net worth (estimated by Forbes about 10 years ago) of $900 million? It reeks of a scam to me, and I honestly don't blame the people who are asking you for refunds right now.

Fidel Castro is the exemplar of what I said previously regarding why Communism never works in the real world: Because one person always gets to decide what resources are taken from these people and given to those people based on their need, and that one person's own need is always going to be greater than the people starving in bread lines and using oxen to plow their fields because there's no fuel for the tractor. 

I'm frankly sickened by Dr. Jill Stein's sentiment towards Castro. He was just another cruel person who overthrew another cruel person, so he could be cruel to more people. The only good revolutionary is one that steps aside when the job is done, and Castro did not step aside when that job was done. Instead, he planted himself firmly in a position of power and soaked it up. 

Green Party, is this who you want representing you? If so, then I'm glad she's yet another candidate I didn't vote for. 

Because when it comes to Dr. Jill Stein, I guess it's actually about ethics in electoral integrity.

I do so enjoy watching SJWs eat each other...

... so I'm just going to sprinkle some steak sauce here in my own inimitable style and then just walk away:

#YesAllWomen

(For those who are confused. #YesAllWomen is "a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign in which users share examples or stories of misogyny and violence against women." If wishing death upon someone just because she hunts and you don't like it isn't advocating violence against women, then I don't know what is.)

Things Which Surprise and Confound Me #1d20

Given that most role-playing games are built around combat -- with killing being the main means of character advancement, and weapons & armor being glorified both as prizes worth killing for and epic upgrades to make my glorious character even more lethal -- it's always a surprise to me how so many RPG designers and publishers are staunch liberals who, when they aren't designing games about killing, want to pass laws that would disarm the populace and turn us all into zero-level serfs.

In related news, my political beliefs pretty much guarantee I will never be hired by traditional RPG publishers to write anything, ever.

Critical Irony Overload!

     So here we find ourselves back at the intersection of Gaming and Gunnies, this time under more agreeable circumstances, I'd say. For today we have seen someone dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light to show their own sins when they would persecute us for our hobbies and lifestyles.

     Leland Yee is an asshole. I tried to come up with a more artistic way of saying that but it's pretty simple. A few years ago he tried to legislate a bill that would make it a crime to sell violent games to kids. Now, I'm not saying "think of the children" here (I hate that mentality), but kids have parents for a reason. If you don't want your child jacking cars and running over prostitutes, or tea-bagging soldiers after shooting them in the head, don't buy GTA or Call of Duty for them. There's plenty of games that focus less on violence that you could get for them if you took the time to review the content for yourself. It's not like we don't already have a content rating system (that's sometimes a little overzealous anyway) and it's not like our biggest retailers don't already card people buying games.

     The biggest irony here is that just a year or so ago, Mister Yee was crusading for tighter gun control, specifically one of those fiddly bits of gun laws that someone who knows more about the subject than me is going to have to comment on. Whether it was gun manufacturers trying to find a way around a current legal limitation or whether it was them trying to stay within those limitations of their own accord is something I'm not qualified to comment on, but he trotted out the "think of the children"

"But I am a father, and I want our communities to be safe, and god forbid if one of these weapons fell into the wrong hands."

"Think of the children. The poor innocents that must be shielded from any and every thing in the world that I personally find the least bit questionable." I suppose it's perfectly fine if one of those guns you were instrumental in smuggling ended up in your kid's hands, just not a legally purchased and well-maintained rifle that they were trained in using by a responsible adult, right?

The whole thing stinks of the kind of sandbox-crime game that he was trying to criminalize. A Grand Theft Auto or Sleeping Dogs writ large, what with the Chinese gangster connection and "Shrimp Boy" Chow being implicated alongside him. Between the company he's been keeping and the guns he's been running, the irony has hit critical mass here. A mutual enemy of gunnies and gamers, today, has been reduced to a laughingstock, and faces real repercussions. Not like that time he stole an $8 bottle of suntan lotion in Kona and the charges were dropped. For reals this time.

Hey Leland. Too bad you can't just give the cops 2 Grand and all your weapons so they'll let you go, huh?

As an aside, I'm going to be really red-faced if I've been using irony wrong this whole time..