In Response to The Hollywood Reporter

Ah, fuck. Here we go again.

I promised I wouldn't do another article about this sort of stuff. Ever since the ol' gamerampage-Battlefront scandal a few months back I had finally decided to throw in the badge and retire from this rage inducing, cherry-picked outrage garbage. Gamergate sucks -- it has and always will. Like, really? Gamergate? Are videogames that important to you? Why does this movement against radical feminism even have the word "gamer" in it in the first place? Didn't you all agree that the word "gamer" sucked anyway?

Anyway, the point is that I quit. However, I guess the old idiom(?) rings true -- a good content cop never stays away for too long.

What brought me back was an article that was published by apparently an actual notable website. Hollywood Reporter, a website whose major viewerbase is made up of what I can only assume to be underpaid soccer moms and college students with those special vibrant color hair dyes, recently released an article discussing the fact that the new trailer for Ghostbusters had now become the most disliked youtube video of all time. And yes, their case is just that (as of this moment) 674,142 people (myself included) just happened to really hate women.

Now, its 10 o clock on May 3rd, 2016 when I'm writing this. That being said, I'm not even going to bother going to the effort to make a deeply worded response to this dumb article. Instead, I'm going to use other people's opinions -- those who posted on the youtube comments -- and just pick out the ones I feel like generally respond to my feelings on the trailer itself:

(click the images to expand them if they're too small)

Alright, so that's the general stuff out of the way. Let's get to the article -- but, before I do, I want to address an obvious point I've never really addressed in one of these before: the fact is that 99% of people recognize this is bullshit and thing the "misogyny" argument is retarded. Let's be real with ourselves -- this isn't some giant threat to society that we've cracked it up to be. It is simply some extremely vocal minority that the media has been utilizing to get a few quick views while spreading fear of a "censored society" to the masses. In a few years, it's very likely that the movements will die out, and the colleges and universities that have decided to follow through with the stupid demands of these movements will finally concede and remove them. I'm sure some aspects will always be the same and continued to be argued about in the years to come, but I think the main reason I hated shit like Gamergate was because it picked very underground, specialized, and possibly even fake articles of "the atrocities committed by radfems" in order to seem like its a bigger deal than it is. This is the same strategy many anti-muslim forums have been making as well, focusing exclusively on the violent acts of islam and completely blocking away any possibility of something positive. Anyway, that mini-rant over, that doesn't change the fact that this is still a stupid article, and I'm still replying to it.

Oh, come on dude. I haven't even gotten to read the article yet and I'm already being bombarded by dumb shit.

Now, I feel like the "film is a victim" argument was addressed by the youtube comments above, so instead I'm going to focus on something else: nerd culture? Nerd culture? What in the god damn fuck is a nerd culture? Is it culture as in like, Mexican culture? Is there nerd festivals? Do nerds come together to commit rituals and sacrifice to their holy nerd god? Is there a some subgenre of music called nerdwave? I admit, I get pretty mad when the word "fandom" is used, but "culture" sounds even worse to the point where its borderline offensive. I still can't help myself from laughing everytime I read a post that says "gamer culture". Like nigga, how you even type that shit and be serious? How does that word come out of your mouth and your first thought is "Oh yeah, that fits perfectly towards the situation." I mean, then again, this woman is saying that bad trailers = sexism so I guess word choice is the least of our worries.

Secondly, what the fuck is a nerd in this context? Ghostbusters is like, a pretty damn popular movie. Like, its a classic. A serious classic. Everyone has seen Ghostbusters. This movie isn't like, some underground classic that has only been seen by a small Tumblr minority. This is a pretty well hyped release. Also, it has nothing to do with comic books, or Star Wars, or any of that shit. Hell, what does the word "nerd" even mean? What constitutes a "nerd" over a "normal human being"? What makes you special for being a "nerd"? For now, I'll just assume that by nerd culture she means Star Wars, Marvel, and the like. Here's a few points on that:

• The female version of Thor was criticized primarily for the writing of the comic, not for its depiction of a female Thor. 
• Much of the problems people have had that involve these changes are mostly due to censorship, the most popular example being the Batgirl cover that was recently banned as some saw it as "implied rape" (what?)
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which featured a main female character and a main black character, was criticized by primarily Rush Limbaugh and the rad conservative krew, not by the majority of people much like this trailer is. The trailer which first featured John Bodega (? idk the british dude from attack the block just google it) had very little dislikes in comparison to likes, and the main outcry at that time was for lore reasons, not problems of race.

Beyond that, I feel like most of the "vicious misogyny and racism" described in the "nerd culture scene" is literally just made up. You can tell how done I am already, and I haven't even read the article. I've made a terrible mistake.

The first problem I'd like to deal with in this statement is the formatting. Like, good lord. It's real easy to fix this problem. It took like like 30 seconds to find where this continues off of in the actual piece, since in that its surrounded by all the other garbage. Secondly, don't both these statements mean pretty much the same thing? Can't "looking dire" still fall into the category of "something strange"? Anyway, I'm assuming the first part is supposed to be the right answer, but unfortunately for us, the author of this opinion chose wrong.

It's because the trailers themselves weren't bad. Both the Fantastic Four and Batman v. Superman trailers opened up the possibility to new interesting ways of telling the stories in their respective franchises, and although the both ended up failing horribly, the trailers themselves aren't bad. Unlike this one.

90% positive? Last time I checked, Facebook only had a like button -- no, scratch that, three like buttons. Where are you getting this 10% negative from? Are you just reading the comments and are going "Hmm yes, by my calculations it seems that relatively 90% of these comments are positive"? I literally just saw an embedded Facebook video like a few minutes before writing this. Unless its some secret hidden Facebook Gold membership feature, I'm pretty sure you're making this shit up. I would also like to point out how straight up conspiracy theory this article is getting, which apexes in the next point.

I think there's an assignment you do in late elementary school here in America where they show you a graph of the popularity of one thing and a graph of the popularity of another thing, and you're asked if that means that graph A caused graph B. It turns out that is false, and that is your introduction to faulty causation.

I feel like this statement is yet another example of faulty causation. The author is implying that amount of largely dislike videos starring females is the direct cause of a large increase in sexism, when that isn't necessarily the case. Still, let's take a look at the videos in the playlist she mentions.

Huh, well, would you look at that. She's right. There is a female majority. However, there is one thing she failed to notice.

THEY'RE ALL MADE BY THE SAME THREE FUCKING PEOPLE

You can't just say it's all females when there's only three god damn females on the list and its just multiple of their videos. I'm pretty sure you need more diversity in order to make that point anything but moot. If you do continue down the line of disliked videos, an interesting pattern develops -- all of the downvoted female videos are critically and popularly panned songs made by popular contemporary female artists who have a history of being critically and popularly panned. In fact, its not just women, either -- most widely despised male artists are also on this list. Hell, I don't even think there is a female majority in these videos. It seems pretty split between males, females, and viewbotted childrens videos.

Anyway, I've now spent an hour on this post, which passes my "actually putting hard work in" time limit. I promised I wouldn't spend too much time on this, so it looks like I'm outie for now.

In case (for some terrible reason) you want to read my gamergate trilogy, you can read it here, here, and here.



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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

Opposing Fronts: Why both Radical Feminism and Men's Rights are stupid

If you went up to me on August 20th, 2014 and told me that the topic I was discussing would turn into a heated national debate, I would say you were absolutely crazy. If you would've given me a true glimpse of this debate as it is today, I probably would've just thrown myself off a building and been done with it there. Unfortunately that never happened, and now I'm stuck still having to deal with this shit.

Before I actually get on the opposite sides of this big thing, let's define feminism.

I can't believe I just said that.

Seriously guys, you learned this in, what, the third grade? It's been almost a year, and I STILL can't believe that this is a debate. Listen, the dictionary definition of feminism is the equality between the male and female genders. Some examples of feminist thought are "females should be paid as much as males" and "females can be physically strong the same way males can be emotionally sensitive".

Wow! Was that really that hard? Apparently it is, because some moron somewhere decided it was a fantastic idea to name two opposite ends of the spectrum the same thing. Seriously, I used to have an early post up called "Feminists are fucking hilarious" because it was before radical feminists were even called anything, not even SJW. People just decided to go all "literally" on it, except "literally" isn't an extremely controversial topic that constantly gets confused on which one you're talking about. "Yeah, I saw a guy bashing feminism..." Which one? The one we all believe is wrong, or the one we all believe is right? I understand that most of us by this point have been able to find our own words for radical feminism besides just feminism, but I feel like there's just enough of the population who is using the same word for both that it STILL manages to be an issue.

Anyway, that was my off-the-cuff rant for today. Now let's talk about the extremes.

Radical Feminism

The dictionary definition of radical feminism is a group, normally consisting of women, who believe that the female gender is much higher than the male gender, and often make sexist remarks while discussing straight males. This group has gone on from just discussing females, and have also "included" transgender, gays, and racial minorities (I put included in quotations, mostly due to these people being batshit crazy and I don't see how anyone from those three groups would enjoy having these people on their "side"). This group is also sometimes called SJWs (Social Justice Warriors), radfems, and even far leftists (for people who can't help leaving politics out of the conversation). Another trait of radical feminism is their insistence that everything must be culturally and politically correct and appropriate or else, but that is a topic of discussion for another time.

Obviously, these people are fucking bad. Fortunately, for the most part it seems as though 80 percent of the population agree that these people are dumb. Unfortunately, that still leaves 20 percent, and in a world filled with 7.3 billion people that isn't a very good sign. Yes, these are people who genuinely, unironically believe that all males must die (And no, minority males are no longer an exception. They're being hunted too. Sorry fellas.) These are people who actually burn books made by white authors because they shouldn't be able to talk about minorities. These are the people who argue with you with every "insensitive" remark you make (definition of that word varies). These are people who think that we need to have actual warnings on every small little thing we do just to not offend people. These are people who think comedy, for the most part, needs to die out. These are people who stage entire protests just because of some offhand comment about females, transgenders, or minorities. These people are insane, dangerous, and like I said, make up a very small portion of people.

Sure, there might be a few people out there who read this who think at least at this time there should be more sensitivity in comedy or comments, or that we should have more diversity in entertainment, and although I may not necessarily agree with these opinions/think they are important issues, I can agree that they are not as radical as, well, radicals.

Yet in the wake of this new wave of radical feminism (yup, it's existed in the past. no, I won't be discussing it in detail here), another, equally small, equally retarded group has come out of the woodwork to combat this so called "feminist threat"...

Men's Rights

The dictionary definition of Men's Rights activism is a group, normally consisting of men, who believe that the female gender is a significant threat to society and that it is men who deserve more rights than woman to keep them in check. This group normally consists of men who have once been rejected by a woman or have met a bad one, and instead of drawing the logical conclusion of "Oh, she was just a bad person", decide to declare informal jihad against the entire group. Remind you of something? Sounds a lot like how racism started.

Now, I'll admit, this isn't nearly as dangerous as radical feminism. Hell, all this is is just being straight up stupid. What? People are making stupid assumptions? Don't they do that already?

Still, its notable due to its a) potential to be dangerous, and b) its at the opposite side of the spectrum as radical feminism, hence the title of this article.

To be honest, there isn't much to say about this one. Most people already know about this group, and know it's bad.

So, that's all for now. I've been planning to do a lot more posts in the future, both on this blog and the other one (Codex of Aegis), mostly because now there's a lot more to talk about.

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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

On Paid Mods

Hello guys, this one is just going to be a quickie. I'm mostly writing this since I don't really have anything else to do (I'm still waiting on a video to export and can't do shit on my computer until its done) and so its not really going to have any fancy pictures or formatting or be written particularly well -- yet I still think its a good time to talk about something that's been plaguing the minds of every PC gamer recently. It's about paid mods.

For those of you who don't like to read walls of text, here's a quick summary.

Should paid mods be a thing?

Absolutely.

Is the way Valve/Zenimax approaching paid mods the way it should be done?

Absolutely not.


The actual idea of paying for mods isn't that bad. After all, the modders are still doing work -- and as long as they aren't just, say, taking the mesh of Frostmorne and putting it into Skyrim, they should be paid for their work. And, of course, modders can always make their mods free, and people can choose whichever ones they want.

The only problem with this is that it can't be forced. It has to be something that developed naturally, and that all of the community had gotten to accept. But that never happened. The standard for mods have always been that they have been free. If this had happened naturally, this attack would have never happened.

Now, you have a massive fracture in the once peaceful modding community. You have massive exoduses from community sites that have been there for years already (see the 600+ mods taken off of the Nexus), massive backlash against the publisher and valve, and modders who have decided to take this to their own personal benefit on malicious levels (see SkyUI creator making his mod unavailable to those who got it for free, or the numerous "lite" versions of mods with ads popping up) so now the question simply begs: can they fix it so that this system can work?

No, they can't. They can, if they're as resilient as Ubisoft or EA, deal with the criticism until there's no more steam left in the protesting and people finally get used to it. But as for finding a way to make paid mods work without just taking them down in there entirety is at best moot.

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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

The Very Strange Case of Kuma Games

Back around '08-'09, there was a studio called Kuma Reality Games, commonly shortened to Kuma Games.

The site was primarily focused around Kuma War, a Source FPS that took real battles only a few days after they happened and put them up in the game. Their work ended up getting the attention of Discover Communications, and they made games for various channels in the network that coincided with television series that went were going on on the channel. Kuma Game's big break was one of these games, and the way I ended up finding them -- Dogfights, a game made for the History Channel show of the same name; both of which were actively advertised.

However, by 2010, Kuma Games vanished.

The website stopped updating. Games stopped getting patched. Kuma War stopped getting weekly releases. Slowly, servers began to empty out. A game that once held hundreds, now only had 1-3 servers.

A glancing thought from a passerby would probably assume that the studio had shut down sometime in 2010, and its audience left with them. However, it only takes a small bit of research to know that that's oh so wrong.

So, what the hell happened? What's with all these cryptic messages on their Facebook and Twitter? Is Kuma Games really still together, or did they get hacked?

Another question that comes into play is why the servers of the website and the game client are still up. Someone is paying for it -- but who? WHO is Kuma Games? Am I Kuma Games? Are you Kuma Games? Are we all Kuma Games? 

But don't worry, thinks get weirder. Way fucking weirder.

It is December, 2011. On an Iranian state television channel, a man by the name of Amir Mirza Hekmati got on stage as a public confession that he had been working with the US government to spy in the Middle East. Most of what he had to say wasn't incredibly important, but one quote did stick out from the rest:

"After working for DARPA, I went to Kuma Games Company. This computer company was receiving money from the CIA to produce and design and distribute for free special movies and games with the aim of manipulating public opinion in the Middle East. The goal of the company in question was to convince the people of Iran and the people of the entire world that whatever the U.S. does in other countries is a good measure."

Kuma Games declined to comment.

It did explain a lot, however: it explains how they were able to have such precise details on battles so close to the date of happening, as well as how the last two games that the developer released were from community members living in the Middle East. But that still leaves one question -- what happened to Kuma Games?

On March 20th, 2015, a few weeks after the start of making this article, the Kuma Games facebook updated with this message:

Wait, what? What's Infinite Overdrive? What's Kuma\TV?

Searching either of these shows Kuma Games newest project, Kuma\TV.

As it turns out, the studio never really left, but rather went through some major rebranding. Certainly what a way to advertise your product, Kuma. 

So whatever might be the truth of what the Iranian spy said, or why their social marketing is a little crazy, or if they're even legally allowed to say that they're working with Discover Communications still, one thing's for sure: Kuma War was Counter-Strike for poor people.

Citations:

Kuma Games Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KumaGames

Kuma Games Twitter: https://twitter.com/kumagames

Kuma TV: http://www.kumatv.com/index.php

Alleged Iranian Spy 'Confesses' that U.S. Video Game Company is CIA Propoganda Tool:

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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

On Equality, Part 2

Part 1

But there is more to equality than just gender and sexuality. A similar issue is going on in the world of race, although unlike radical feminism this movement is not built on greed but rather decades of true oppression and segregation. In a time where all races should finally be equal, tensions are greater than ever.

Once again, we have the Google Dilemma -- except instead of applicants we have suspects, and instead of Google we have the government. The only way for all races to live equally is for them to understand each other, and to understand that neither race is after the other one. Blacks are not trying to attack whites, nor are whites trying to attack blacks. When you mix black and white, all you get is grey.

As with gender and sexual equality, the media and entertainment try to push one side of the coin as much as possible. Once again, it is foolish and silly. To achieve equality, the coin should be put on an equal level; or else you get the same problems that have existed for years, just the opposite way.

In order to achieve equality, it doesn’t matter if you’re gay, female, or black, anymore than it does if you’re straight, male, or white. It may be a long way until true equality -- all over the world there is still oppression, double standards, and genocide. However, this is the best chance that we’ve gotten in a long time. I pray we don’t fuck it up.

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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

On Equality, Part 1

Modern society seems to be focused on one system: the creation of seemingly perfect equality, whether it be social, racial, sex, or sexuality. The endeavor is noble; and perhaps one day, though it may be well after our lives are over, we will be able to achieve this equality. However, the creation of this perfect society is threatened, and it is threatened by some of the same people who dare say they wish to have this great system.

Making this claim is controversial, but rarely anything that is an important statement isn’t. Therefore, I’m not going to bother preparing for whatever opinions you may have, and instead trust in your own reason and understanding to see truth, or at least understand, what I am saying. Many of these faults come from our own nature as human beings, and so many will try to avoid it. However, no one gets anywhere trying to hide from their mistakes.

Feminism is defined as the belief that both male and female should be on an equal level; though in recent times it has come to include equality between different sexualities as well. The movement has been on a swift rise recently -- but with all popular ideas, there comes both positive and negative versions of it.

Radical Feminism is a new type of feminism. It is not based around traditional beliefs of equality, but rather a minority -- a very vocal minority -- who believe only in their own advancement. The movement does not serve any particular gender, but rather only people who follow it. Recently, this new movement has stirred an incredible amount of trouble in the entertainment medium; I intend to explain exactly how and why this happened, as well as how to stop it.

As feminism has become popular, it has lead to another, perhaps more innocent incident -- the sudden shoving of diversity into the face of the masses. More and more companies, movies, games, et cetera, have tried to push their brand as being more progressive than the other. This is quite a silly ordeal, and in some ways even leads to a bit of irony, as some companies and universities have become prone to choosing more diverse applicants than “normal” ones.

However, as radical feminism continues (which, as has been mentioned, is a very vocal minority), it continues to push these poor practices, and in turn, people who are acquainted with radical feminism tend to begin to confuse the rise of feminism as actually being the rise of radical feminism, and so the two conflict. The actual feminist side, seeing this conflict, finds it unreasonable -- and then they begin to confuse radical feminism as true feminism, and the cycle continues. In case you couldn’t tell, that is very bad.

The main reason something like this happens in the first place is the result of a problem called the “Google Dilemma”. Say we have 4 applicants, and two are “diverse” (which is group one), why the other two are not (group two). What counts as diverse or undiverse, I honestly have lost track by this point.

Anyway, the company/university has been claimed to favor one population more than anything else, though whether this is true or not is debatable depending on the place. The people who commonly push this are the radical feminists, but as this now normally transpires through the internet, it becomes very hard to tell what is a small group of loud people and what is an actually large protest. In turn, the company/university is forced to make a decision.

Now, case one is that the group one applicants are indeed better than the others from group two,  and in that case the answer is simple: you would obviously choose the group one applicants because they are better and it would look favorably on you. However, the dilemma is in case 2, in which group two is better than group one. If you choose group two, then people will continued to be riled up about your choice, however if you choose group one, then you are choosing the group with less experience, denying the group that does have it. That, and group two could probably figure out that that is what happened.

The main question is this, however: will this ever amount to anything serious? Likely not -- of course, though there are people who suffer from the “diverse selection”, they will still end up easily finding a place in another company or university. It is hard to imagine a world where those who are white, male, or heterosexual become oppressed (much to the distaste of radical feminists), and in the end diversity will begin to become a norm, stopping the need for the push or the dilemma, and therefore ending the cycle. This will likely be the final result.

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Twitter: @CodexofAegis
Facebook: facebook.com/CodexofAegis 

The Legend of Funny Pizza Land

Over the years, video games (just like any other form of media) has had its series of myths and legends. From the obviously false Tails Doll, and the recently confirmed ET dump, or perhaps the ever mysterious Polybius -- people tend to continue to tell their own stories about these oddities, real or imaginary. Funny Pizza Land may be just like these, but is unique in its own way.