The webcomics blog about webcomics

All About Ants. Really.

Photo by unknown; sourced under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) from AntWeb

The religious fervor that any fragment of the population assigns to their particular hobby has always puzzled me. I define myself as a lot of things: husband, engineer, EMT, moustache-haver, Subaru driver. The fact that I’ve been playing videogames since before the original Atari home console has never compelled me to define myself as a “gamer”, but whatever.

Define yourself however you like, but understand you’re going to be lumped in with the actions of everybody else that claims your particular tribe. That includes everything from low-grade defensiveness to the stunted, sociopathic fraction of the gaming tribe that has an inquisitorial zeal to stamp out the “heresy” they perceive in the “threat” to their identity in that a) somewhere, somebody might like games that are different; and b) women are having sex. This has lead directly to:

[T]he unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives. — 28 CFR Section 0.85

You get a gold star if you can figure out what word that definition applies to.

If you think that the word gamergate can be salvaged to refer to anything other than reflexive misogyny (sorry, ants, you need another word) suffused throughout with a piquant But we’re the real victims here, do me a favor — stop reading this page. The world is changing in ways not entirely catering towards you, and the way to deal with that is not with doxxing, rape threats, death threats, school shooting threats¹, and voluntarily associating with a spastic movement to “punish” anybody that doesn’t agree with you². I’ll be on the other side of history with the non-garbage people.

Back to webcomics tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy these quality laugh-chuckles that I picked entirely at random from the internet.

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¹ Honestly, it’s like you’re trying to prove that Jack Thompson was right. You have no idea how hard it was to type those words in that order. I once got into a face-to-face argument with that guy but right now there are people providing empirical evidence for Thompson’s thesis that videogames turn young males into violent, remorseless criminals. Good job, geniuses!

² But I’m not like that and you’re a big meanie Gary! Sorry, you picked a label that’s being used for those purposes, the entire world knows it, and the only outcome here is that your carefully-adopted identity goes from pretty goddamned mainstream to denigrated and despised fringe group. Which, given the amount of whining I’ve seen, is pretty much where you think you are already. I think that you’ll find actual pariah status to be far less comfortable than you’ve imagined it to be.

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