Discover and Read the Best of Twitter Threads by @InnuendoStudios

Me: I swear the next video is going to be shorter.

Me: I'm going to write a quick endnote.

Me: I'm in a good writing mode, let me write a second endnote for later in the series.

Me: Maybe this second endnote should come first, let me record it.

Me: ...it's 21 minutes long.

WHY

AM

I

LIKE

THIS

??????????

The only good thing to come out of this mess.

Now Fascism Today is talking about getting fascists kicked off social media platforms and the fear that the same tactic could be used against antifascists, and is portraying social media companies as WAAAAAAY bigger allies than they are.

Like, he talks about which fascists have been kicked off Twitter and Facebook without mentioning *just how long* it took to get them booted, *just how many* are still online, or the ways these sites profit off of Nazi presence.

Fuckin' Jack Dorsey *following* half the Nazis on here should at least warrant a mention, I think?

He also doesn't even mention ban evasions and alt accounts.

Fascism Today is using the currently fashionable definition of "doxxing" that I still feel is too broad to be useful, where "someone attached a name to the face of a Nazi at a Nazi rally" qualifies.

I think this is only defensible if you're going to engage with the difference between that and the public release of addresses, family members, bank details, etc. that the word usually refers to.

The point is, "doxxing" usually refers to inviting harassment, not inviting social consequences for actions people do publicly with no effort to disguise themselves.

In the game of I'm Pretty Sure That's What Fascists Do, how high does "White House releases doctored footage likely edited by a white supremacist" rank?

https://twitter.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1060450557817708544

Not that the game shouldn't have been over around "the President is putting Honduran children in cages/promising to build internment camps/claiming he'll end birthright citizenship" but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

don't be ridiculous, Ian, the difference between this and real fascism is *insects bursts forth from esophagus*

Before you argue with conservatives claiming Obama began the practice of family separation that Trump is enacting, read this. The argument is a gross distortion of history. vox.com/2018/6/21/1748…

The conservative argument that we "didn't care when Obama did it" is already a racist ploy that ignores differences of scale, so we often accept the premise because, by they're own arguments, they're still wrong.

But then we accept and often repeat an untruth.

Short version: Obama did not separate families for the crime of crossing the border. Crossing the border is a misdemeanor, rarely prosecuted or meaningfully penalized in Obama's day.

New video essay! Conservatives condemn the Left for doing watered down versions of the tactics the Right depends on; herein we discuss the moral weakness on the part of liberals that makes this tactic work.

To keep this series coming out, back me on Patreon. patreon.com/InnuendoStudios

🤘🤘🤘

To any young followers for whom this is the first election you can vote in: You're probably hearing a lot of people telling you that voting is the most important thing you can do and that any apathy you feel around it is ruining the country.

I'm recommending you ignore them.

Voting is like sex: Simultaneously one of the most important things in life, but also kind of not that big of a deal.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by how many ballot measures you don't understand and how few politicians you know anything about and your underpaid Civics teacher's explanation of the Electoral College was more confusing than helpful...

Don't sweat it.

No more showings of Bad Times at the El Royale despite what it said online so I guess this is happening.

That movie was edited with a Salad Shooter.

OK, I get it. Damien Chazelle's deal is he believes suffering, loss, and sacrifice are A) necessary and B) worth it to achieve greatness.

He sells B very well but has yet to convince me of A.

First 1.5 hours of First Man: "Claire Foy is right, we could accomplish all these things without all the needless death if we weren't in a pissing match with Russia."

Last half hour:

But I'm pretty sure no one should ever date Damien Chazelle.

I'm thinking of shutting down my Curious Cat.

I get a steady - if not enormous - influx of messages asking for advice on extremely personal and sensitive problems that I am not remotely qualified to answer.

Like, I'm a cishet white YouTuber, I don't know how to help you out of your dysphoria or internalized homophobia.

But when someone asks me something so vulnerable, I figure if I don't answer, or if I answer saying "I can't help you with that," I'm likely making a person in pain feel even worse, so I fumble at being some kind of helpful.

With the launch of Return of the Obra Dinn, every game from my 2015 adventure game hype list has been released EXCEPT for Lionheart Drive, which, sadly, looks like it might be dead.

You can read my Adventure Game Masterpost, with links to capsule reviews of some of the released games, here: innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/130815436…

I won't be able to give thoughts on Obduction or The Witness without a new/better computer, so Obra Dinn, Nelly Cootalot, and else Heart.Break() are the only games left to write up. Need to finish playing them!

Fascism Today's chapter on misogyny is doing me a few concerns. It's the first chapter where Burley is discussing things I have done considerable research on myself, and his characterization raises a few red flags.

For one, his description of GamerGate seemingly conflates the 2012 harassment of Anita Sarkeesian with the 2014 campaign against "ethics in games journalism," where Sarkeesian was again one of the main victims.

In other words, it's a description of GamerGate that doesn't mention Zoe Quinn, or any other target of harassment other than Sarkeesian. While he only spends a paragraph mentioning it, it's a major oversight.

I'm reading Shane Burley's Fascism Today, and the way he defines fascism is nearly identical to the way Corey Robin defines conservatism, which is damn unsettling let me tell you.

Burley, for his part, defines conservatism the way conservatives define themselves, focusing on Christian-inspired family values and free-market economics.

He doesn't connect fascism to Robin's historical perspective that defines conservatism as about preserving hierarchies.

But, reading both books in tandem, the structures are nearly identical. There's the same romanticism of a past where The Right People were in control before those evil modern progressives took power away from them.

INSIDE HAS BEEN OUT FOR THE SWITCH SINCE JUNE????

y'all motherfuckers been asking when I'm gonna play it for YEARS and then it comes out on a platform I actually own and NOT A FUCKING PEEP

Hope no one expected me to do anything else this evening.

I can still recite a poem in lapine, the made-up rabbit language, from reading Watership Down one time in 9th grade.

https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/1047871523187556354

hoi hoi, u embleer hrair
m'saion ule hraka vair

hoi hoi, the stinking thousand
we meet them even when we stop to pass our droppings

(forgive me if I've borked the spelling)

I can even still tell you what it means!

The Thousand was the collective name for the various enemies of rabbits. Rabbit religion was designed around the experience of being prey: Any animal that might eat or harm a rabbit was part of The Thousand.

I'ma get real about @Patreon for a minute here.

At my level of notoriety, my Patreon has stopped growing in any meaningful way.

The problem I have with YouTube ad revenue is that it keeps you chasing views. People love a video, hate a video, you only get paid if they watch it. Encourages you to make videos quickly about whatever's trending.

That's not the kind of video I want to make, and I hate ads, so I made the first milestone on Patreon that I would keep ads turned off forever.

I had an idea for a dating sim a while ago where there'd be an invisible stat for "chemistry," and each potential dating partner's chemistry stat would be randomized with every new game.

Dates would be successful or unsuccessful depending on how well your other stats matched what was important to the other people: You'd have a stat for good looks, sense of humor, creativity, etc.

All could be raised through effort to some extent.

But you could never change your chemistry with a dating partner, and could only kind of guess at what it was from how dates played out.

And it would be the most important stat of the game.

Actually, fuck that, I *do* have something to say I didn't say in the old thread:

The people reactionaries call "SJW infiltrators" have always been there. Many of us have been around longer than the reactionaries.

https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/1037772362635194368

Feminists didn't "infiltrate" gaming, they just got harder to ignore.

People love to point to The Last Jedi as an attack from outside, as if Rian Johnson didn't grow up on Star Wars same as the rest of us.

It's just so blind and dishonest to ignore that a lot of people in your fandoms just *are* political and progressive and always have been, and they were talking about the politics of video games and Star Wars before you even knew what either WAS.

Very reasonable folks getting mad at me for a tweet thread from a month and a half ago that they still don't comprehend.

https://twitter.com/poke_badger/status/1037510857654063104

I promise you they did not find this by reading my timeline, they're sharing the same screenshot IMC posted when I got dogpiled for the same thread in August.

Just stirring up old shit with the same crap arguments.

I have no new responses to this bullshit so you can just read my thread from the last dogpile:

https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/1022465755441442816

Can we just talk about how "sometimes a platform is actually a gallows" implies, with the word "sometimes," that sometimes it isn't?

Does Gladwell have some idea of what makes a platform a gallows? Does he have a plan? Did Remnick?

https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios/status/1036969934054674433

Fucking hell, liberals with their "Y works sometimes" so they just keep doing Y no matter how many times it fails with no correction.

The liberal response to "our methods are failing" is "I guess we didn't do them hard enough."

Anyway, folks, remember to argue with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving because that's the one and only way to stop fascism.

I'm having thoughts about the Condescending White Man brand of media criticism popular on YouTube - Plinkett, Yahtzee, CinemaSins - and how these characters are both fictional and aspirational for their intended audiences.

Thread incoming.

So I was thinking about this after watching @thelindsayellis' recent Q&A video:

In it, she mentions that useful media criticism is often a matter of having an emotional reaction to the media and putting into words what you think the media did to provoke that reaction.

The new @ContraPoints is phenomenal, and reminded me of this nugget from Andrew Solomon's TED Talk on depression.

This is the self-reinforcing misery incels are embedded in.

Watch Natalie.

Also listen to Andrew Solomon. He's a pretentious fuck, but if you need a way out of self-loathing, he's articulate, compassionate, and thoroughly-researched, unlike a certain lobsterman.

ORWELL TOOK A BULLET TO THE THROAT FIGHTING FASCISM YOU JACKASS

https://twitter.com/seb_uHu/status/1028991893198315520

Cheong is a disgrace to the name Ian.

Real talk: This is the ongoing attempt to distance modern antifa from historical antifascist movements as a means of condemning all efforts to stop fascism without appearing to endorse fascism itself.

Kicked off the week by typing "bloviating internet chodes" into a Patreon comment.

Incubus was a band that would throw out words like "zombified" or "combustication" in the same songs as "somnambulant" or"reciprocity," and, while I'm not really a fan anymore, I'd say this deeply influenced my writing style.

Or like that scene on Step By Step where Dana's professor, in reviewing her first college paper, says, "I'm going to give you one very big word and one short one: This paper is supercilious crap."

A E S T H E T I C