OK, I’m sorry for just one thing: I’m sorry I have such a wonderful editor.

I was barely into the thread itself by the time I was hard at work on a YouTube-type comment.

In considering both the comment thread and the blog above it—which I’d interpreted as some litany, as some unreal catalogue of hither-and-thither complaints—I wanted to respond, because I know that professionals who are enmeshed in any sort of politic business are unable to respond to these types of criticisms, or with any passionate emphasis. This makes me angry all on its own.

Also, professionally and personally, I was deeply unimpressed.

As my remarks snowballed, though, I realized I should write something for myself, just to let it all out. Well, and when I say “for myself,” I mean “for Infinite Lives,” which is my site and oh my god I periodically drag my co-writer through the mud when I irresponsibly follow some wild livejournal tangent.

So suddenly I wasn’t working on a frothing Internet comment at all; I was writing a piece for this very site instead.

My editor IM’d, wanting to know whether my column were finished yet, and I was very, “NOT NOW I’M BUSY” to him. He wondered what I was writing, so I sent it to him in four or five chunks over IM. He announced he wanted to publish it, and from there we really giddily lost our minds, our enthusiasm mirroring and magnifying. He cut one chunk and I cut another, and now we agreed the piece was totally ready to go. He gave it a much better title and suggested some images, and I told him I was all-in. I endorsed every addition myself. I was furious and happy.

For me, it was as much about “fun” as it was “ire.” I decided, if I were going to feel irate about something, wouldn’t it be great fun to just run all the way? Because it’s totally true—I’ve forced my writing to be this very level-headed, contemplative thing for a long time. I’ve always held that “manners are how we show strangers we care,” and I certainly believe it.

But I’ve also noticed I do that thing girls do: I rely on “hedged” diction to couch everything I say in some sort of apology. Maybe it would be nice, for once, to forget judiciousness.

So here the article is again.

In the course of what I wrote—which I admit I haven’t reread ever since we published it, out of real, sheer terror at whatever I said in the moment, probably something seething about grinding my enemies’ bones with a pestle into powder—I am sure I made much of having worked in a “mainstream” capacity in the past.

And I’ll explain why: it’s sickening that people in “mainstream” arenas don’t get to defend themselves fully and blood-boilingly. (Since having worked in “mainstream” “games” “journalism,” I finally returned to retail, where people might believe your politeness makes you an idiot, or else they believe that the man and woman at the cash register aren’t actually the owners of the business. Surely the chip on my shoulder is calcified by retail work; that’s fine.)

It does make me angry that being a “mainstream” writer means you never get to say what you mean. Mainstream businesspeople never get to defend what they “do.”

You never have an opportunity to defend yourself, because your primary motive is to do the work you already do in this stiflingly politic way. Have you ever been trapped in a position where you are not allowed to defend yourself, or where you happily make yourself the scapegoat at every opportunity? It’s an incredibly helpless, please-kill-me feeling.

I have spent most of my post-high-school years trying to not be brash or bombastic, and it’s just so passive-aggressive. And what would it be like to be aggressive, without all that horrible passivity? I wondered about it.

So I figured, sure, people might enjoy hearing what I sound like when I yell in the living room, absolutely livid, about almost anything. Because I do: I shout and point in all directions, just hissing and spitting, trying to work out my feelings. Sometimes this means I can make an outline later, so that I can write some well-conceived, mannerly thing, but just for fucking once I just wanted to set down all the hissing-and-spitting. I thought this might be interesting for my core readers, or at least it could be more fun for me.

OK, maybe I was bored. Maybe I was bored, but I wasn’t being disingenuous: I meant everything I said. Oh, man, did I.

Wouldn’t that be fun, though? I marveled. People have been getting a little too comfortable around my writing these days, I reasoned. Maybe people should not feel so comfortable. Maybe they ought to know I am a loaded gun. Maybe I should take a worthwhile opportunity to say what I really think.

Maybe I could learn how to not say “maybe” and start saying things with a little more certainty and authority.

I idly wondered how this attitude might look on a woman. What would the response be like? It thrilled me.

I decided I wanted to play a villain. It would be so much fun! I wanted to play with the fact that I am not an emotionally generous person. I think I was—sometime in the past—but I’m not right now. (I also wanted to reinforce that you should be more frightened of the judges’ very humanity than of the mechanized “process.” I think this is a fair point.)

This all might have been selfish of me: I might have not helped anything. That’s too bad.

“I don’t have any strategy here at all,” I admitted to my editor in an IM. In real life, I sighed. But my “career” has taken hits before: I don’t have so much to lose. I should be allowed to say what other people would like to say. I should even be allowed to say what I would like to say.

I am only just now trying to explore where “no manners whatsoever” and “meanspirited” diverge. Where do they diverge?

Anyway, I told my editor, “Let’s put the ‘go’ in the ‘go-for-it.’”

My editor did suggest we omit some of the article, especially those parts where I confess all the ways I ever went wrong as an IGF judge. I said no way. I said I wanted to be beyond reproach. He said all right.

I also demanded that my editor cut a paragraph about why I didn’t judge IGF this year. The paragraph was intended to promise game developers that I had nothing to do with this year’s drama; instead I found myself listing sad things. My editor cut the section at my insistence.

Maybe an editor ought to be more persuasive, but I am happy mine was not.

And anyway, those parts we kept are important, they are part of my argument: I am not too sure there is a way, in any system of checks and balances, to democratically account for human error. It isn’t even real irresponsibility: it’s just being human. Robots cannot review a game. Sure, robots cannot give up on your game, either, but they also cannot critique it. For better or worse, we do rely on humans to have all these things happen.

And there is human error coming at this from all sides. Certainly it is terrifying for me to advise, as a former professional and current outsider, that perhaps developers should examine their games a little harder for problems. If someone—someone who is explicitly commanded to play your game—is bypassing your game, there might be an issue. Really! That idea hardly seems controversial!

Of course, I also believe that checks-and-balances are already built into the system. I’m not sure, at least at this early juncture, there is a way to change my mind. In the original column I say it—“you can’t do better”—and it’s just the thing someone says in an abusive relationship. But I really, really mean it. I’m not sure you could scoop together a better, more varied assortment of humans to play a single game.

So there is human error. But there is always human goodness, too, always there to overcompensate. And the humans involved in this particular system always have the best hopes in mind. You can republish every piece of personal correspondence they mail—sorry to bring it up again—but I won’t change my mind.

This part infuriated me most, I can freely admit, and I feel very reconciled about overstepping the bounds of politeness, manners, and decency in addressing this. Maybe it was totally “eye for an eye” of me. Maybe I scooped up too many fish in my net. But I will wholly admit my goat was got, at the outset, because some people had a bad attitude about some very, very nice people. (Here is the other troubling thing: we are all “nice people,” all trying to help one another out. Again, why call someone out over loving you?)

Perhaps it isn’t so “cool” of me to fight for something so “mainstream.” I joked to my editor that my conservatism was beginning to show, but also that IGF’s only real sin—the only reason their intelligently-devised process is held up to such speculation and skepticism—is that they are so “mainstream.” Would any other process get so widely smacked-down?

I believe the machine works. I mean, I’ve gone back to see what games won the awards I thought someone else ought’ve won; I can see why which games win. The machine really does weed out the worst. I do believe that.

I also believe that decrying the machine undermines every winner all the years previous. This makes me furious. Do we no longer care about all the games that have already won? We are talking about incredible games. Where is any evidence of nepotism? This makes me angry, too.

Before he published my rant, my editor asked me if I were ready. He asked me if I were prepared for the repercussions. I told him that, after I formally took my first professional job but before I’d actually moved across the country for it, I’d already had my first penis photoshopped into my mouth. Was I ready? Please.

There were only a couple reactions that were really inappropriate. I was due them, though: I was curious about what it might be like to try to sound like a man on the Internet. So I found out.

This next part is a quick aside about what it is like to post your opinion to the Internet:

One guy accused me of “Girl on the Internet Syndrome.” Really? Really, guy? I’ve been on the Internet since 1993, and I’ve long since grown out of the shock of also being female. He also wondered who in the IGF I am boning, which was a little bit more astonishing. I might be a little lovey-dovey about IGF—you can accuse me of wearing rosy goggles all you like—but I certainly haven’t gotten any sex out of it. (Someone should have told me! That might be exciting!)

Another guy recommended I die. That remark was deleted! I was sad to see it go! I asked my editor about it, and he said we had “policies” already in place. Aw. It’s nice that we have a “safe space” in the comments section, and I thanked him for this.

But all these comments were pretty much anomalous. Honestly I was surprised by their infrequency.

But there was one complaint that really jarred me while all the others didn’t. That one came from a game developer named Anna Anthropy.

Anna is working, as both a developer and a critic, from a fringe wherein she is able to point out issues of “otherizing” and “dismissiveness.” She is either sensitive or opportunistic to these cues—I am not always sure which, because I agree with her about 50/50—but when she makes a stink, I listen more carefully. This time, when she perceived that I was using silencing tactics (in this case, “Oh, you think you have issues? SHUT UP,” which is certainly how one should interpret my rant), I had to take inventory of what I had said.

Anna had crammed the point into a quick joke, into two short, well-timed lines, and it was important that I stop and listen.

Am I bullying? Did I create an unsafe space for game developers—including those people who take issue with the system already in place—for making their criticisms known? Because that really would be dangerous, if I have actively created a space where it is frightening to make needs known.

This last count is harrowing. I am still wrestling with it.

So if I am sorry for anything, it is for being a bully. I would really hope I hadn’t been. I would not want to be a bully.

There was an article someone linked, soon in the aftermath, about whether it were “possible” to be a “writer” in the “digital age.” It was entirely about those slow, careful things we write, with consideration, in a vacuum, versus those things one is tempted to post in a hurry, however carelessly, to the Internet.

But in that article, one famous author noted that he would never willingly sign his name to his own “rants” and “blasts.” I did. I marched, however haphazardly, from posting a comment to posting a column in the most visible forum I have. I put my name on it. And even though I am scared of my own wrath—even though I really fear being a bad person—by God, yes, I’d do it all over again.

VERY LATE EDIT: It turns out I’ve delivered some of these same opinions before. (In the comments: “You know what happens to indie games mainstream-reviewers want to criticise severely? They don’t review them. Like, obviously.” —Kieron Gillen)

• Rotting Cartridge: What’s Wrong with the IGF
• Unwinnable: The IGF is Just Fine—You’re the Problem
• Penny Arcade Report: Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank responds to Independent Games Festival drama with logic, and some anger – (hang out in the comments)
• Andy Moore – IGF is awesome, and not perfect – (hang out in the comments)
• Rotting Cartridge: RE: What’s Wrong with the IGF

Some days I am happy to be alive.

(Thanks to Mike Emmons for, uh, whatever.)

ETA: as a scant few members of Kotaku’s readership rushed to mention, yes the video is old OK.

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?

Er. Most games journalists have such a distaste for PR people—please, stop me if this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule—maybe because we often get stuck rewriting press releases as pretend-news. Sure, I’ve had misunderstandings; I’ve had tiffs. Ugh, marketing. Ugh.

Why the disdain, though? Most PR people are authentically very nice! Obsequious sometimes, sure, if they’re doing their job. Pesky? All right. And it does seem like some of the girls exercise and drink vodka-sodas and wear tight pants and go clubbing after work (sorry!). But no PR person has ever really made my life miserable. In fact, PR people have split cabs with me, asked me about my job and my life, and taken me to dance clubs. Like I’m a swan-in-waiting! Or the ugly sorority sister, I’m not sure which. So there’s this palpable cultural divide, but PR people do go out of their way to not be jerks. I think back on the inventive ways I’ve maligned PR people—they try to be so nice, and you can get away with murder, hilarious murder—and in retrospect I know who the real jerk is.

I am struggling, in fact, to think of even one marketing person I’ve ever sincerely disliked as a human being, and the answer is, Me, Just Me, Anytime I Ever Did Anything that Felt Like Marketing, Even in Passing. God, can I be passive-aggressive. (The other ugly reality is, a lot of professional games journos, the married ones [which is impressive in itself; I think very few journalists manage to stay married], when suddenly faced with unemployment—and I am describing people for whom the financial dangerousness of freelancing is not an option, because there is a house and all these mouths to feed—will move swiftly and directly and invariably into the arms of PR, or marketing, or community-management, or whatever can crush a writer’s dignity readily and wholly.)

For my own part, I can only think of one industry email exchange that ever even approached rudeness. Long ago, a famous video game developer, in keeping with the spirit of his ‘pose’, contacted me to “get the ball rolling” in an email that was flip and obnoxious. I was actually kind of giddy when I received this email—certainly not offended, because I myself have hammered out some peevish emails to bosses—but I also didn’t know where to begin with my reply. So I… didn’t… write… back. I didn’t write this famous important dude back! The next morning, I received a second email, and this one was apologetic, deferential, and over-polite. And I was giggling as I wrote a very professional reply, but I was also very “Oh, no! This guy thinks I’m mad at him! That’s awful!”

And lately, the only strongly-worded email I’ve sent was to a company that sells and ships dog ornaments. Dog ornaments. These were sculpted ceramic dogs, intended to be looped onto little paperclip-hooks. I was writing on my mother’s behalf, of course. I did not receive a strongly-worded email in kind; I fixed that ish right up. (No, my mother did not owe money for a dog ornament. How dare they.)

What I am saying is, Paul is anomalous. He is nothing like the average PR person, as the average PR person tends to be very nice. Or indie developers, who have to do their own PR, they tend to be very nice also. I don’t think Paul is representative of games culture at all?

Oh, some people are willfully bombastic—even twerpy—and yeah, I’ve emailed threats that I cowrote with my legal person up in corporate, but even those were, I don’t know, nice? They were nice, measured, understanding, compassionate legal threats. (Of course I would think I’m “nice,” but seriously, now. Nothing good has ever come of an email sent in a hurry.)

I am trying to wrap my noggin around my own schadenfreude, and I think the word I’m looking for is “horror.”

Many writers, for instance, are horrified at the very thought of PR—it’s the machine that kills artisticalness! or whatever—and they project that horror as a type of disdain. But PR people are paid to be nice. If you have ever been a CM or worked retail, you know how difficult it is to be paid to be nice. You will kill yourself trying to stay nice. This weirdo, Paul? He’s gaily breaking every marketing rule. That is horrifying. Why is it so horrifying?

And it’s great fun, almost always, to crucify every socially aberrant behavior.

Which is not to say that “Paul” is in the right—he isn’t, and for the love of God, he should maybe pursue a course other than marketing, some course that won’t tax his writing skills, say—but again, why do I hate Paul so much?

Why do we all hate Paul?

As Mike Krahulik tells it, it’s because Paul is a “bully.” Oooh. We hate bullies. I really hate bullies. I, too, wish bullies would lose their jobs, exactly the way Paul has lost his job, publicly and cruelly. But bullying is not aberrant in certain professions; rather, bullying can be the hatter of success. Few people have gotten far on “nice.”

But we are sitting here on the Internet at all because we believe in the Internet’s ability, when speaking in one chorus, to invert the social hierarchy, whether to recognize RAW TALENT that otherwise wouldn’t be acknowledged, or to topple bullies and give them what-for. That hope is why I boarded the Internet in 1993, as a miserable preteen, and I bet that is part of the reason you are here now. We champion underdogs.

But when I was briefly a CM I discovered how easy it is to suddenly become the “bully” in any given narrative—this is to say, to become the person at whom the rest of the Internet is angry. It is a surprising position to find oneself in. And while it feels interminable and is forever googleable, it thankfully does not last.

I think I’m talking about this because Dave, in the Kotaku comments, became so apologetic. (This might be due, in part, to Paul’s apology.) Dave never intended his customer-service complaint to explode the way it did, now that we all hate Paul. Has Dave ruined Paul’s life? Dave wonders; Dave worries. Dave worries about becoming our champion. Dave worries about the way we have all seized on Paul.

Paul isn’t a nice guy. Paul shouldn’t even be in marketing. The world is full of not-nice guys; less so, marketing has some not-nice people, people I myself have never chanced to meet.

Still, maybe Dave is right to worry about us.

Update: Owen Good of Kotaku took the same stance as I did, only stronger, and the backlash in the comments—-calling for his op/ed to be “unpublished”!—-is so extreme, I cannot even.

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.

My first issue with “An Open Letter to Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”—which was published by the Border House, a blog you should absolutely add to your Feedburner, and please don’t think I am assembling a firing squad aimed at either them or at the letter’s goodhearted author, Mattie Brice—is the title. The title! Because: where does our issue lie? With Joel Johnson? Or Kotaku? I mean, “Kotaku’s Joel Johnson”?

If the issue is only with Kotaku, oh, boy, you’re coming a few years late to the party.

Kotaku is a Gawker-style website—what am I saying, it literally is a Gawker site!—and when you aggregate interesting factoids, you’re going to be slumming in the lowest common denominator’s neighborhood, always. No, please, stick with me. I hate to cop to my own subjectivity, but true story: since June, I have been writing for a celebrity gossip website for money, and it’s honestly the best gig I’ve had in maybe my whole life. I applied for the job a month before my (adoptive) dad’s death: I can write what I want usually; it super-coordinates with my life’s schedule and time commitments; I’ve actually been reading this gossip website since 2005ish; I love my coworkers; I am sometimes proud of my work because I am sneaking some pretty progressive stuff onto the site, probably to everyone’s horror; I actually replaced Molls McAleer, which is kind of cool; and all the rest. But I really do have to post nudie pics if I am the first to a “story.” It can be gut-wrenching.

I remember the first time I told my mother I was about to put a photo of a penis onto the Internet, and I think she could see I was basically begging her—her! This 80-year-old, immobile, mostly-blind, mostly-deaf, just-widowed and bereaved Christian woman on dialysis—to excuse me. Absolve me, please! And yet it’s just how that machine works, because I really do write for a celebrity gossip aggregator. Yes, duty calls! There are moral and ethical questions every day, and some days, there are even invasions of privacy and hacked cell phones and Scarlett Johansson’s ass, and it’s my first time ever being on the uglier side of certain ethical web dilemmas, all because I was the first of my coworkers to stumble across Scarlett Johansson’s ass that morning.

And so I do have to talk to my mother, every single time. Time and money, by necessity, have become important to me. Maybe I really am a bad person. But good God, it’s my job to post asses just as politely and ethically as I can, and I do my damnedest to personally mitigate that job requirement with feminist leanings and progressive politics, and I try to be satisfied with myself. Yes, open-letter author Mattie Brice, we do seek to be absolved, all of us. I only added these paragraphs because I wanted to. Let’s move on from this aspect, I hope.

So perhaps, at an aggregator site, you’re going to get a lot of facts wrong; you’re working fast; you’re going to post headlines as they siphon into your RSS reader, journalistic integrity be damned. That is how a certain style of paid writing works. No, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t. (In acknowledging this, I am actively agreeing with Mattie Brice’s fine open letter, OK.)

Now, in my old life, where I worked at a big-budge video game website—one of the biggest, for a time!—we might have collectively rolled our eyes at Kotaku a little. We did! Us! We did! All of us at some gigantic corporate-owned website, where cosplay galleries were all the rage! Because when Kotaku was breaking a story, we knew we had to go back and fact-check every freaking headline, and we were left picking the wheat from the chaff. But the truth is, that big-budge video game website I worked for was waaaay-aaaaay less progressive than Kotaku from the very get-go, in part because we scarcely covered fringe culture—even though the real weirdos at work, who were into Game Center CX, independently developed games, anime, and video games that only released to Famicom, were trying so, so hard to cover those things.

But then, at Kotaku, something much more interesting started to happen? I mean, Kotaku has always been interesting, but when Stephen Totilo joined the ranks—and to be sure, there were already some pretty fine writers at Kotaku, but when Stephen Totilo signed on, as Deputy Editor, right under Crecente in the hierarchy of importance—I sincerely doubt I was alone when I arched an eyebrow. He’s a really fine critic, and thoughtful; his reputation well precedes him. The hell? I remember thinking. What is Stephen Totilo doing, defecting to Kotaku? I doubt the “old guard,” Kotaku’s longstanding readership, even understood what they were getting when they got Stephen Totilo.

The capable and artful Leigh Alexander had already been around awhile, a goodly time before Totilo, as a columnist. She has long contributed editorials to Kotaku even as she constantly relays these very developed news stories for Gamasutra. If you somehow aren’t familiar with her byline, she’s all business, but then, too, she’s the Average Jane guys love and girls adore, and even that assessment shortchanges the woman. But suddenly, suddenly! Here comes Kirk Hamilton as a Features Editor. The man worked at Paste, OK, but something fascinating and quirky and helpful and truthful has been happening to his writing for a long while, and here he is now, devastating Kotaku with his truth bullets. (No, how could I be subjective? I love these writers.)

I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but by the time Joel Johnson signed on, he was so totally screwed: something has been happening to Kotaku for a little while now.

Their white male readership has noticed, and they have taken aim.

Kotaku’s Joel Johnson? Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

When I met him, he was Gizmodo’s Joel Johnson, telling the world about hip, hip cell phones. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Instead, he was Joel Johnson creating a communications network for victims of Hurricane Katrina. A little while later, he was Wired’s Joel Johnson; then he was BoingBoing’s Joel Johnson. Who is this Kotaku’s Joel Johnson?

What I’m saying is, you have very goodheartedly and inadvertently made it personal. I think your issue is not with Joel Johnson. It is with Kotaku, a job that the man was grandfathered into, and Johnson only just now has a say in its coverage. And here is the heart: you are confusing the person with the job’s role.

Moreover, Joel Johnson is strong enough to change the site’s editorial direction over time. So wait. Just freaking wait. I have done my very, very best to explain machines to you; this is how machines work. It’s ugly, and I hate it, and I’m sorry. But wait.

You can say that changes in Kotaku’s coverage aren’t coming fast enough. That’s fine, but it also defies the point of his Kotaku article, wherein Johnson is actually addressing a cultural whiplash, admonishing longstanding readers for their claims that changes are instead coming too quickly.

And here we have arrived at the crux of my ire: Joel Johnson is on your side. What side? Your side. Aformentioned writer Mattie Brice (I love you!) accuses Johnson of “handwaving,” of a lack of willingness to discuss “the issue,” and I just cannot begin to grok that. I might offend you with this, but Kotaku has never been for minority groups. No, I know, and I hate that, too, and I always have. But it’s changing. Let it change. Kotaku cannot, will not, be a “safe space” tomorrow. And that’s maybe the real point: Kotaku has always tried to maintain its finger on the pulse, and the fact that Kotaku is changing tells you things are changing.

P.S. May I remind you how entirely different this whole thing is from that dumb dickwolves thing, not that aaaaaaanyone has confused the two. But if they did? Remember: in posting, Johnson was opening up a forum for conversation and understanding, which means his intentions were different from the beginning.

• From Johnson’s Twitter, here’s an interesting deconstruction of both sides of the argument.

• ETA: Also, Jayson Young supports and encourages both Brice and Johnson for each stepping up to the plate.

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.

• Rachel’s Whatever Blog

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?

• Nerdist – G4 Picks Up “Web Soup” sort of via Perez Hilton

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.

• Etsy – Paw & Claw Designs

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.

The entire Bento Challenge flickrpool is well worth checking out, but Rena’s contributions to the group are just astonishing:

• Flickr – 20080530 :: bento diary :: tatooine (via)

Related posts:

1. Crafty Tuesday: Making Yoshi out of potato salad

Apparently the novel garnered unfavorable reviews from the book club’s members, which resulted the following news item in the town’s local newspaper:

• Nerdflood – “We all agreed that we really don’t know what will happen in the future”

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.

• Joe Blow Glassworks – Raygunz
• Fanboy.com – Hot Glass Rayguns