Hey, remember that beyond-terrible “crowdsourced” GamerGate book I featured here not long ago? Well, Zoe Quinn has put together a crowdsourced dramatic reading of it! That’s it, above, if you hadn’t already figured that out.
Enjoy!
Hey, remember that beyond-terrible “crowdsourced” GamerGate book I featured here not long ago? Well, Zoe Quinn has put together a crowdsourced dramatic reading of it! That’s it, above, if you hadn’t already figured that out.
Enjoy!
Today, the most pretentious, and also probably the most ridiculous GamerGate video I’ve seen so far.
Over black-and-white footage of assorted video game shooters, the YouTuber who calls himself PowerIndustry tries to provide a bit of inspiration to his comrades in the virtual trenches who have chosen, as he puts it, to “stand and fight.”
For those who can’t make it through the whole nine minutes– and there may be more than a few of you – here’s Mr. PI’s basic argument.

So you waited until the last minute to pull together your #GamerGate Halloween costume. And you’re lazy as crap.
Well, you’re in luck! Here are seven totally half-assed, no-effort #GamerGate costumes you can pull together in a few minutes with stuff you have around the house!
So yesterday I discovered a #GamerGate manifesto that started with these dramatic pronouncements:
We are Gamers.
We are alive.
And that was just the opener.

Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?
That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.
Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”
So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?
Longtime observers of A Voice for Men have been wondering for some time why John “The Other” Hembling has vanished from that site. Hembling, once the site’s Editor in Chief and number two figure, was not at AVFM’s much ballyhooed conference this summer, and his name has mysteriously vanished from the masthead. AVFM has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever offered a public explanation for the falling-out with Hembling.
Now, after months of silence on the topic, Hembling is telling his side of the story.
I thought I’d give the Misogyny Theater treatment to our dear friend Davis Aurini, the woman-hating, Anton-LaVey-looking “filmmaker” who is busily raising money for the documentary about Anita Sarkeesian and the Social Justice Warrior Menace that he’s allegedly making with his friend Jordan Owen.
I don’t often write about Alison Tieman – the eccentric FeMRA videoblogger known better as Typhon Blue – in large part because, well, have you ever watched one of her videos? Her arguments and assertions bear so little relation to what the rest of us know as reality it’s as if she lives in some weird inverted world of her own making.
It’s rather difficult to address the arguments of someone when virtually everything she says is wrong – logically, historically, morally – in some fundamental way.
But I’m going to have a go at her latest video anyway, because, well, it’s only 4 minutes long, which will make unpacking its fractal wrongness a little less of a daunting task. Also, there’s a kitty in it.
The Sam Pepper situation just gets uglier and uglier. As YouTube sex educator Laci Green explains in the video above, Pepper, under fire for “prank” videos on YouTube that appear to show him sexually harassing numerous young women, is now facing serious accusations of sexual misconduct from numerous women – including, in one case, violent rape.
For those who haven’t been following the story as it’s developed over the past week: Sam Pepper is a former Big Brother UK cast member and YouTube personality best known for a series of unfunny “prank” videos which have often featured him sexually harassing women in various creepy ways.
[NOTE: The original video on Davis Aurini’s YouTube channel was taken down shortly after the post went up. So I’ve embedded the version that is, as of this moment, up on the director’s YouTube channel. I”d recommend that you download this for your permanent collection.]
Ok, so I’ve been working on a post about the latest ridiculous doings of our friends Davis Aurini and JordanOwen42 — the not-so-dynamic duo who’ve been desperately begging for money to make their Totally Serious documentary about how evil Anita Sarkeesian is. But then I watched this, and it’s too good not to post on its own.
This is Lust in the Time of Heartache, a short “philosophical” film written and produced, and just posted on teh Interwebs, by Mr. Aurini. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be a comedy, but I was laughing at it from beginning to end.
There’s nothing about this film that’s not terrible and ridiculous, from the choice of fonts in the title sequence to the names of the characters as revealed in the closing credits.
Where even to start in criticizing this mess? The, er, “acting?” The pretentious, pseudo-philosophical voiceover, delivered by Mr. Aurini himself? The shrill, frantic — yet somehow also meandering — music that plays almost continuously from beginning to end? The ludicrously unconvincing fight choreography? The ill-fitting suits? The evo psych? The dawning recognition that this whole thing is meant to depict how Aurini sees himself in our “fallen” world?
The fact that this ten minute film credits a “parkour consultant?”
I’m going to borrow a couple of lines from Pauline Kael’s famous review of the legendarily stinky 1970 film Song of Norway because they offer a pretty fair assessment of this one as well:
The movie is of an unbelievable badness. … You can’t get angry at something this stupefying; it seems to have been made by trolls.
She means “under the bridge”-style trolls, not the modern kind.
Oh, and the sound is awful, too. NOTE: Dialogue is supposed to be louder than the background noises.
Anyway, just watch it. It’s only ten minutes long. And definitely stay for the final credits. You’ll see why.
But hey, don’t take my word for it. Read this glowing review, from some dude on YouTube:
Excellent writing that encompasses the transitions from one cinematic style to the next. At first I was concentrating on the technical problems and lackluster performances, however, after about 5 mins in, the pacing kicked up a notch. Well done, sir.