This is an incredible article, because it shows what happens if you are a woke white man. Deck Nine makes progressive games and its CCO, Zak Garriss believed in assembling a diverse narrative team. But the people he hired hated and resented him and tried to destroy him.
In 2018, Garriss gave a talk at GDC about how he assembled a TV-style writers room for the game “Life is Strange: Before the Storm,” and how he believed “diversity of representation and perspective” strengthened the work. gdcvault.com/play/1025374/P…
But when he was nice to his team, they accused him of “love bombing,” a manipulation tactic. They insinuate that he was coming on to female employees, although he is never alleged to have tried to date any of his subordinates or that he made any kind of sexual advance.
Basically, they accuse him of having conversations in the workplace that were never inappropriate, and walking a female employee to her car on a night when they had worked late, and impute a sinister intent onto this because he is a white man.
The “love bombing” ended when Garriss’s team started to make it clear that they despised everything he was and everything he represented. His junior team members got very hostile and started invoking identity when he didn’t take every one of their notes.
Garriss’s was the Chief Creative Officer and the narrative lead. He was the principal author of the narrative. He had final authority over all story decisions, and his staff’s job was to assist him. But as a white man, they believed his job was to shut up and listen.
In response to the tense atmosphere in his writers room, Garriss stopped meeting with the writers. He worked alone, made decisions without their feedback and only consulted with the staffers he actually liked, holding meetings at his home to avoid the other writers.
When the writer of this article says Garriss “quit voluntarily,” she makes it seem like he was pushed out of his positions over these issues, but he has no gap in his resume and went from his job as CCO of Deck Nine to Vice President of Story Development at Telltale Games, the much larger developer and publisher of narrative titles that was publishing Deck Nine’s next game after “True Colors.” He was promoted.
Garriss had a sterling professional reputation and produced well-regarded creative work, but the diverse staff he brought on to share their unique perspectives didn’t value his talent and resented working under him. After he left, they took over and destroyed the studio.
A bunch of woke staffers had a huge freak out over the fact that the numbers 88 and 18 appeared in places in the game. In certain far-right circles, 88 is a code for “heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
The number of 18 is actually symbolic of life and good luck in Jewish numerology, and I had never heard of its far-right significance, but apparently an obscure British Neo Nazi group uses the number to represent Adolf Hitler’s initials.
In response to this meltdown, Deck Nine announced mandatory diversity training for everyone. The woke staffers tried to get anyone who objected to undergoing this training fired.
Telltale Games ended up cancelling the project it was working on with Deck Nine, and Deck Nine ended up going through layoffs. Zak Garriss is now creative director for the Chinese gaming conglomerate NetEase.
The way IGN reports on the gaming industry is pretty shameful. It is pretty clear that this writer has written a major feature for this site centering the narratives of some junior staffers who were hired for their identity, refused to work for or respect a white male boss, and ultimately caused a lot of problems and did a lot of damage to the company that tried to employ them.
For all the effort these disgruntled former employees and the hack journalist have gone through to destroy Garriss’s reputation, the only concrete allegations present in the article are that he was very nice to people who behaved appropriately in the office, that he did not respond favorably to the employees who made his writers room a hostile space, and that he did not immediately take every note and incorporate every change suggested by people who were higher than him on the progressive stack.
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The problem we have right now is that anyone who claims asylum is entitled to a hearing to determine whether they deserve to be classified as a refugee. We are now getting millions of these claims every year and actually granting asylum to maybe 25k refugees.
The vast majority of asylum claims — about 97 percent of them — are transparently invalid, but the reason people who know they are not entitled to refugee status are claiming asylum is because they will be allowed to remain in the US while their claims are pending. For years.
A few ways to close this loophole might be to:
1. Restrict who is entitled to a hearing on an asylum claim. For example, people who have traveled through a third country, like Mexico, where they could have claimed asylum and did not are not entitled to claim asylum in the US.
2. Make “asylum seekers” wait for their asylum hearings in immigration detention facilities, or make them wait outside the US until their claims can be adjudicated.
A lot of weird Marvel fanboys are coming out with this. The difference is that Warners is burning off the last of the DCEU properties before completely rebooting the property. Aquaman is the last gasp of a dead franchise, and everybody involved is already fired.
They cut costs finishing the movie and released it with an attenuated marketing spend. They basically dumped it.
The Marvels is a disaster. Marvel is supposed to be the blue chip franchise. The production budget on this was $270 million and they did a major marketing push for it. And even though it was one of the most expensive movies of all time, it didn’t look like it because so much was spent on reshoots and VFX shortcuts to stitch the pieces of the film together.
The Marvels missed two release dates because it was in such bad shape. Ant-Man 3 had to be pushed up six months to fill in the slot The Marvels was supposed to release in, and as a result, it was released seemingly unfinished.
I would like to share my experience being radicalized by the YouTube algorithm which sends you down a rabbit hole of increasingly extreme content.
At the start of the pandemic, I was cooking a lot at home, and I started watching YouTube food videos. I became a fan of a YouTuber whose channel is called “Binging With Babish.” Babish, whose real name is Andrew Rea is a personable video editor and amateur chef whose food channel in which he attempts to construct food items from movies and TV shows became very popular.
However, I ultimately was interested in more technical cooking, and I began watching a YouTube chef named Joshua Weissman, who was cooking in a fine dining restaurant pre pandemic and started a YouTube channel that has become extremely popular. Many of his recipes are technical and challenging, but I did make his famous birria tacos, and they were very, very good.
But after watching a lot of Babish and Weissman, YouTube began feeding me stranger videos. From there I started watching videos from GugaFoods, an ebullient Brazilian who performs meat-based “experiments” often involving $250 Japanese wagyu steaks.
The reason a lot of young progressives are so mad at JK Rowling is that they read the books as kids, and they thought they were Harry or Hermione. But they grew up into people like Percy or Dolores Umbridge or Cornelius Fudge or Rita Skeeter. And they know it. And on some level, they’re ashamed.
I’m reading the fifth book with my niece and it’s kind of astonishing how well it tracks to contemporary controversies. And Rowling is on the same side now that she was when she wrote it. Which is the side of people who tell the truth, against people who suppress and deny the truth in service of their ideology.
Cornelius Fudge and the Ministry of Magic are unprepared to deal with the return of Voldemort, so Fudge simply decides it isn’t happening and endeavors to silence anyone who says otherwise, which sets him in conflict with Dumbledore.
Media figures all seem to agree that Twitter has gotten much worse since Elon Musk took over. If you aren’t seeing what they’re seeing, it’s because your experience of this website has historically been very different from theirs.
Prior to Musk’s Twitter, a curated group of about 500,000 users out of Twitter’s 368 million users had blue check status. The message many of them broadcast was that this wasn’t very important, but it absolutely was, and it’s the reason they had a special experience on Twitter.
First of all, blue checks get — and have always gotten — significantly more favorable treatment from the algorithm that populates your timeline. You are more likely to see tweets from people you follow who have blue checks.
One of the biggest let downs of doing research for crime fiction was learning what serial killers actually are. Real serial killers nothing like Patrick Bateman or Hannibal Lecter. A serial killer is just what happens when a psychopath has a particular sex fetish.
There are two kinds of serial killers: Killers who get off on torturing and causing victims to suffer, and killers who kill people to use their dead bodies or parts of their bodies or mementos or trophies to gratify themselves sexually.
They call the first kind “process killers” and the second kind “product killers.”
There is no such thing as an ideological serial killer. There is no such thing as a serial killer who believes he is transforming his victims into works of art. There are no Hannibals or Jokers. They’re all just perverts jacking off.