Wired’s Chris Kohler:
Found: A lifetime ago, @jennatar and I sat in a diner and brainstormed website names on a placemat.
The year was 2006! According to Kohler, I registered this domain the very next day. Other names in the mix: duckdragons; pixelface; any fabricated word that could combine some “variation on a popular Japanese word in the U.S. lexicon” or “variation on (peripheral).”
This video has been around for maybe a day and a half, tops—in Internet Time, it’s already months old—but I really enjoyed its not-too-malicious dramatic reenactment of the dumbest, most interesting Holiday Shopping Nightmare human interest story ever told in 2011.
Also, Revision3’s Anthony Carboni is nowhere near jacked enough to play Paul, the villain in this melodrama, and this bit of miscasting is charming all on its own. (Kotaku and Escapist have the full deets, but the video might be enough.)
There are a lot of things about this I don’t understand. I don’t quite understand why “Dave,” the unhappy customer, forwarded his ongoing, charged email exchange to Mike Krahulik (“Gabe” of Penny Arcade, AKA the hotheaded one), except that Dave needed some muscle on his side. Mike tried his best to mediate, which is weird enough anyway, but there was little reasoning with “Paul,” the erstwhile giant of PR (whether he is even a PR guy is up for debate) who until recently had mishandled the marketing for some weird video game peripheral. Which, if you are wondering, did not ship in time for the holidays, and how dare you email Paul about this, Dave.
In a way I do feel bad for Paul. When a shipment is trapped in customs, you might feel helpless, especially when the holdup is not your fault. You can’t get frustrated with other people, though. Like, you just can’t.
So it turns out Paul might be a little bit of a nutjob; unsurprisingly, Paul no longer has a job.
And yet, and yet. There is so much pleasure—so much schadenfreude!—to be derived from this entire Greek tragedy, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m getting off on it, along with the rest of the mob. It’s just so much fun to see a juiced-up marketing guy finally get peed on, isn’t it?
But why do we even feel that way?
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Put your pants back on and take that seat over there. Good, thanks. Let’s hash some things out.
Let me start by reminding you that I’m a girl. Not only that, I’m an angry girl.
Joel Johnson, Kotaku’s fairly-recently-appointed Editorial Director, posted a little article titled “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku.” (Evidently, Johnson has been taking a lot of flack for Kotaku’s new editorial direction[s], which is increasingly fluid and interesting.)
And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.
“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.
So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:
Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.
And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.
Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!
Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.
He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.
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OK. I am not antagonizing the “Wee for Wii” program—most STIs are treatable, and young adults should feel responsible for their own health—but the odds of winning a free Nintendo Wii are comparatively bleak. Ouch.
I try not to make it a secret that I’m hopelessly addicted to celebrity gossip. No, I know: it’s a horrible way to spend my time, and it’s embarrassing that I blow my cigarette money on US Weekly, OK! Magazine, and People at the local CVS. I know, I know.
But one thing I like about E!’s reality TV weekly roundup, The Soup—you may have known it as Talk Soup in the 90s—is that it’s just a little smarter about everything, just a little more impish. Oh, sure, it helps that its gangly-hot host, Joel McHale, is twinkly-eyed and snappily dressed. Plus, he totally has it out for Tyra Banks, Miley Cyrus, and Kathy Lee Gifford.
Now, the minds behind The Soup embark on their greatest challenge yet: making the inanity of eBaumsworld funny. They’re producing a new show satirizing the worst of the Internet, Web Soup, premiering on the please-air-something-besides-Cops nerdery channel, G4tv. Hosted by Chris Hardwick, the spin-off promises to bring The Soup’s trademark snark to the awful car wreck that is Internet Video. LOL!
On the one hand, I have my doubts: the type of audience that watches web videos is exactly the sort that always catches it a week ahead of you. Like great celeb gossip, Caturday videos go viral well before they get reprinted on the newsstands several days too late—er, I mean, retweeted.
Still, The Soup’s own success defies all odds. Reality TV is dull, piddling, and the brain’s ultimate muscle relaxant—what possible commentary can a host add to something so stupid? And yet it works! If Web Soup reproduces even a third of The Soup’s charm, it will be well worth watching.
But can it compare to Current TV’s Viral Video Film School? Only time will crown the victor.
Web Soup premieres on G4tv June 7 at… 9PM… PST? Or sometime? Anytime?
I realize it must seem as though I sent Infinite Lives to the cornfields during GDC, but in reality, I have been planning my BIG MOVE to Chicago! Ahhhh: It seems like only yesterday I was complaining about Chicago, and then moving out of it. (Well, and also, planning a bridal shower, doing some web-work, doing gory makeup for a film shoot, and having the flu—there’s no telling when Infinite Lives will normalize again, frankly.)
I haven’t entirely abandoned the site, of course! In fact, in the interest of supporting it, I have been toying with a banner ad slash affiliate program called Project Wonderful. And while Project Wonderful doesn’t generate enough revenue for me to wholeheartedly recommend it, I do think it’s cool that I (yes! Me!) am able to basically pick and choose whose ads cycle through the little square on the right.
And I can’t wait to run this one ad for D20 necklaces.
Apparently, she has twenty-sided dice available in most every color of the rainbow, to be strung onto silver-plated ball chains, satin cords, or keyrings. And don’t get me started on the 42 earrings.
Sincere apologies for the protracted absence! (Inexplicably, though: now more spam comments than ever before. What the…?)
In the short interim before resumption, here is a video, embedded below, that popped up in my YouTube subscriptions the day before yesterday. It heralds what is sure to be the winter season’s hottest fad, the PES Fireplace Screensaver.
P.S. Still here? Perhaps you are wondering how PES correlates with videogames? This is how.
OK, OK. The photo itself is from a few months ago, apparently, and this really doesn’t have anything to do with video games, I know. But I figure Star Wars devotees and video game players might have overlapping cultural interests, and anyway, I liked this. Ready?
The entire Bento Challenge flickrpool is well worth checking out, but Rena’s contributions to the group are just astonishing:
My e-friend Nathaniel Payne lives in a small town in America’s heartland. Recently, his town’s local book club agreed to read The Children of Men, a science fiction novel that takes place in the near future (2021, if you’re curious). The Children of Men is generally acknowledged as a pretty good book: it was adapted into a blockbuster feature film, which I own on DVD but have never watched.
Apparently the novel garnered unfavorable reviews from the book club’s members, which resulted the following news item in the town’s local newspaper:
In my five years of collecting rayguns, I’ve learned to never buy or display anything too pricy… or priceless. Anytime a guest drops by, his instinct is to immediately swipe the raygun from the shelf, wield the gun in his right hand, and roughly depress the trigger several times, eliciting that satisfying rat-a-rat-a-whir from the gun’s bellows—it sounds like, if nothing else, a hard drive crashing.
But as of right now, I am willing to make an exception to my No Delicate Rayguns policy.
Blogger Michael Pinto located these gorgeous blown-glass rayguns, which are crafted by Joe Blow Glassworks’ Jeff Burnette.
