Evening internet! Some of you will be glad to hear that my month of posts about games is now over! So now it's time to get back to what I do best: drinking whiskey and sounding slightly self righteous (this is a blog after all, I have to keep up to quota or Google will shut me down). As you may have guessed from the title this week's post is about pop/geek culture references and how they are killing humour on the internet. Let me start by saying that I am fully aware that I may be one of the people murdering comedy with 'jokes' about Watchmen, science fiction and various other things from the nerdier side of the fence but someone's got to speak up and it may as well be me. I'm also going to do my best to avoid too much analysis; E.B White put it best when he said "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."
SCIENCE!
Don't get me wrong, I like a good laugh as much as the next guy but in recent months I've seen a lot of things like this cropping up on my facebook news feed from people who I generally find tolerable at worst:
COMEDY!
This is not funny, it's just a bunch of characters labelled with their defining features. It's funny in the same way that the following picture is funny:
which is to say not at all
Essentially the author has said "here is a collection of things I know about, if you're cool you will know about them to and laugh because I have stated facts about them". The comic strip currently has almost 3,300 shares and 5,200 likes on Facebook so people also appear to be buying into this concept. They appear to be laughing at it to show they are also cool and sending it to their friends who are doing the same thing as the picture spreads like a virus of stupid hipster bullshit.
here we see said virus multiplying via mitosis in host cells
So what we have is something that is 'funny' but isn't actually funny at all; it's simply a barrier to entry. If you get the joke you laugh and are let into some kind of conceptual club on the internet. But it's not a good club, the music is shitty and everyone is wearing Joy Division T shirts that are too big for them and pretending to enjoy themselves.
So why does this bother me? I don't enjoy clubbing - conceptual or otherwise - and I don't need to laugh at unfunny things to prove anything to anyone so why am I annoyed? Nerdy culture references done right in the real world are a great way for shy people to instantly connect with one another. You hear someone say something or see a specific design on an accessory or piece of clothing and a new line of dialogue is instantly opened up. One of the first times I actually talked to my current girlfriend was at a costume party when we were both teenagers because I was the only guy there who knew she had come as Link not Peter Pan.
Millions of quiet people make millions of first time connections because of this kind of thing; the internet has taken something that's a force for societal good and used it as a cheap excuse for lazy humour. What was once a tool for inclusion is quickly becoming one of exclusion and that's the real joke.
Stay Crunchy Internet
PS. It appears this entire post decrying hipster bullshit boils down to "I was doing something before it was cool and now everyone else is doing it and it sucks" wow... Irony's a bitch.
I am still alive internet! I have braved the multiple assaults of summer man flu and survived! The sun is shining, this year's costume projects are progressing nicely, my yugioh deck is now up to tournament standard and life is good. Or is it?
Apparently there is more to life than first turn Shi-En
This week I want to talk about why I'm bad with people. Or more accurately why I'm good with people but for the wrong reasons. First of all let me say that I'm not misanthropic, I don't hate people and I don't sit in my room all day on the computer hiding from society at large. I have however realised that I have developed some quite alarming behavioural patterns and attitudes as a young adult which could lead to issues further down the line.
I Often Find Social Interaction Draining, I Relax on my own
I've always been happy in my own company - one of the main reasons I have so many hobbies - and thats fine and totally healthy.
One man Wolfpack 4 lyfe
The issue is that I find general social interaction (such as at parties, work and larger social gatherings) quite draining. I often leave these events feeling like I have lost energy, not been energised by the company of my peers. At rest I am generally still and quiet; I don't really socialise to relax. As a result I have recently noticed that I actively avoid some forms of social interaction in lieu of more solitary pursuits; I would rather spend an evening playing Tf2 with friends than actually seeing them face to face for example.
The clubs are just as crowded on the internet as irl these days
The oddest thing is that I'm very gregarious and apparently have good social skills; I've been known to hold entire rooms with anecdotes and I tend to make people laugh a lot. You'd think that I'd be boosted by such experiences, not used up by them but alas the latter is usually true. Luckily I think I know why.
I play the Jester Because I want to be Liked
I think it's possible that I developed a keen grasp of humour at an early age because I wanted to be liked and that need for acceptance has grown into a refined persona I use to 'fit in' as an adult. This leaves me in an interesting position as I now essentially have two personalities: the solitary, quiet, vaguely artistic gent who paints models and makes costume props and keeps people at arms length and the confident, roguish young man with a twinkle in his eye and a need to be liked and laughed at. Is one the more essential expression of self? Are both healthy? Are both rooted in some third all encompassing personaily which is simultaniously creative and self depricating, in need of both intimacy and more space to breathe? Who am I really? Should I listen to less Linkin Park?
CRAWLING IN MY SKIN, THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEALLLLLLLLLL
What am I Trying to Say
I guess I'm essentially two people. I wear a jester's mask in public a lot of the time and that's something I've done for as long as I could crack a joke, it's too late to stop now. As my personality has developed so has the mask so it must be as much a part of me as anything else. While being a solitary artistic brooding type may be easier its far sillier and I'm not going to win many friends doing it so I should accept that not every social interaction is going to enrich me as a person. I have friends and people close to me who do energise me so I should spend more time with them, not create solitary projects to give me reasons to avoid them because it's less hassle. People can be difficult but the more you go out there, the more likely you are to meet someone you really connect with and that is truthfully all a lot of us are after. So it's time for me to stop worrying about me and start looking at other people. They deserve a good laugh to.
So this bank holiday the Queen managed to struggle though a whole lot of puffed up pomp and circumstance for her diamond jubilee, the festivities of which turned out to be a kind of adoration based Highlander that put the Duke of Edinburgh in hospital.
"Bollocks to this Liz, I'm going to pull a sickie and play Civ 5 back at home"
"Very well darling but remember there can be only one"
These gilded celebrations were not however the focus of my weekend, I had my eye on a much more vapid and dissapointing series of events. I am of course talking about E3. So much was wrong with the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year that I risk loosing focus on this week's subject due to the massive amount of chagrin I feel. Many people have already pointed these out but here is a brief summary of this year's biggest failures from what I saw:
Flo-Rida and Usher.
The lack of actual games at the Microsoft conference.
The fact that the majority of airtime was given to games that are all basically titled Modern Gun Shooter 69: Shoot the Arabs/ Russians in Their Dirty Faces.
Don Mattrick's closing statements that make him sound like a megacorp CEO from the dystopian cyberpunk future.
Capcom's loaf headed and awkward rep presenting Resi 6 (which appears to be a poorly upscaled ps2 game).
Tobuscus being present as part of the Ubisoft conference but being relentlessly and awkwardly ridiculed by evil android corp woman.
Sony's apparent abandonment of the PS Vita.
Nintendoland not actually being a real theme park.
As I said however, none of these are the focus of today's writings. Today I wan't to talk about sexism.
I may have mentioned this before but I have spent most of the last 5 to 10 years mingling with the rest of nerd kind. In the anime society I was in at university we were also very into gaming. We had lan parties and celebrated Wintereenmas. Also our best chairperson (and a good chunk of our attendees) was a girl. The chairperson of the gaming society when it started up towards the end of my university life was a girl. About half the council of the LARP society were girls. Over half of the Sci-fi society were female. When I go to anime conventions around half the people going are ladies.
Here are some of those ladies. Sometimes they like to dress up as ponies. Because they are awesome.
It's 2012 now and women can do stuff, personally I'm very happy about that. Its nice that I can talk to people of the opposite sex about things that I am passionate about and get something back for a change. I say this not because I think every girl who talks to me properly is a win for me but they actually bring something new and interesting to the table other than a pair of tits in a tshirt. The problem is big gaming corperations don't seem to agree with me.
None of these girls are here because they want to learn about Watch_Dogs
E3 was most sobering for me because of the way women were presented by companies like Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft. I think there were probably more hotpants barely covering buttocks during the Microsoft show alone than there were actual game release announcements and this is not acceptable. As a man I find it patronising and insulting that these people think I will buy a game just because conventionally hot girls were near it at some point and it makes us gaming gents look bad that someone thinks that. Every single new dance game was an excuse to get some scantily clad chicks on the stage to gyrate lustfully for 3.5 minutes. I would have preferred to see some overweight bearded guys have a go; at least that would be funny and unexpected.
It also struck me that pretty much everyone who had something interesting to say was male, the only girl who did any actual gameplay demoing was this cretin:
SUURE GAIZ
Who played what was essentially a rubbish 3D angry birds clone in a manner that seemed more aggressively scripted than a League of Legends Summoner Spotlight.
Ubisoft suffered from similar issues, opening their conference with more hot pants and dance game shenanigans. Things just got worse from there with a painfully awkward female compère who couldn't decided whether she was the world's worst standup comedian or Tobuscus' harried school teacher and a Farcry 3 preview that opened with tits. Towards the middle of the briefing things appeared to get a bit better with an e sports demo featuring some girls with what appeared to be genuine pro-gamer cred. And hot pants. Who got beaten down by some guys. Oh well. Near miss I guess. I think this video a friend recommended to me sums up my reaction here better than I can:
Now I know that teenage boys are big business at the moment but its because of them that we now have a gaming market choked with games that involve shooting people in the face down corridors. A trend which we are starting to get fed up of. Now I'm not naive enough to think that a great deal of gaming is still done by ignorant teenagers (there are entire youtube channels devoted to trolling them) but it should be the responsibilty of companies like EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft to help change this, not feed into it.
Girls play games now (many are very good at it), the core gamer community is evolving and its time that the companies who make games for us started evolving their attitudes to.
Hello, my name is Simon Payne and I enjoy reading books, gaming and artistic pursuits (who am I kidding, I like Warhammer and similar nerdy things). I like to make bold statements, can be unnecessarily confrontational and enjoy intellectual arguments so much it borders on social self destruction. I also enjoy the company of cats.
As you may have also noticed I rarely use 5 letters when 55 will suffice and am sometimes what scientists refer to as "a pretentious little faggot". I try to stay in control of this side of my personality and it only tends to come out at dinner parties after I've had too much to drink but as I've already named this blog after a Fish album from 1990 and am quite possibly already drunk you're just going to have to roll with it for now.
I started this blog in an attempt to get over an ex girlfriend who cheated on me (with one of my best friends... I'm not bitter) because I know there's nothing the Internet loves more than voyeuristicaly - it is a word shut up - watching people have nervous breakdowns and misery. I was also hoping to share some of the things I've learnt during my gradual, slimy evolution from teenage nerd to man-child without a cause. I can't promise quality... or quantity... or any kind of regular update schedule but I promise if you read my blog God will reward you with many lolcats in heaven.
If you don't like cats I'm afraid we may not get along
So there you have it, I'm basically the same as all the other slightly jaded internet guys out there. There is one major difference however, most of them have never had an armed police squad after them due to a case of mistaken identity. Is that true? Does it have an entertaining and satisfying story attached to it? Will you get to read it if you visit my blog again? POSSIBLY!
