Well I guess bitchados got tired of trolling. Back to what this thread is really about people.
You’re right, it can be borderline scammy. It could also be the case that author X’s progression of ideas and order of proofs is genuinely easier for student A to understand than author Y, while student B prefers author Y. Maybe author X explains the motivation or historical context behind the ideas, which is essential to student A, while student B prefers a more austere style. Look how many people swear that Khan Academy is the best teacher they ever had, while there are much better resources at their local library. I see no difference here, although any evidence of her plagiarising or claiming to be the only source for her ideas would be welcome, and definitely put me in the camp of people who think this is a scam.
Scam or not, it comes down to individual tastes, but she’s no Sylvia Browne is what I’m getting at. Now she’s literally “living aids”, where I use literally in its modern sense, meaning “not literally”. Now I’ve killed two birds with one stone by saying something bad about a woman, something that anyone who mildly defends any woman can seemingly never do!
I classify it as a scam because the money she was supplied was to help with production costs and research costs, aka actually buying the game. But if you look at her videos, it’s PAINFULLY obvious that she has only gone and read about the games instead of actually playing them, leading to her out of context, cherry picking clips about OMG DA GURL IS VICTUMOIZED FOR NO REASUN!!
Aside from her questionable use of the money, her argument has no clear focus. The overall theme is ‘treat women better in gaming’, but her attack on any inclusion of females seems to dissuade that. If they’re strong (in her mind ‘masculine’) then it’s just a guy with tits, if they’re weak they’re depowered, if they’re of average or lesser intelligence they’re misogynistic, if they’re straight and show an interest in a male they’re a power fantasy, but if they’re lesbian it’s just another trashy sexual fantasy. Asexual? What, women can’t be sexually empowered? GEE GEE CISTYPE!
It’s this sort of narrow minded anti-sex, anti-equality shit that really makes her argument and those who share it look like morons. They bitch and moan for females with complexities and unique qualities, yet the only character they would be interested follows this checklist:
- Strong, if not the strongest in whatever mythos they’re in.
- Beautiful without having any sexually attractive features.
- Respected, especially by men, as a leader.
- All appealing parts of her body must be covered, but not enough for it to be sexist!
- Has to be incredibly intelligent, must never be outsmarted by a man.
- If within a world where conflict is normal, must be able to fight as well as, if not better, than men.
- To go with this, she must also never be defeated and must never get hit or put in a position of weakness, because that’s a power fantasy.
- She must have an attraction to either gender (that includes all your polygoggly transfishmen as well, I’m not a CIS-enabler!) but never act on it, after all, she’s a female so secure with herself she doesn’t need to do things she likes.
- The big baddy can’t be a female, either, because that’d be the developers acting out their cat fight fantasies. It must be a man, but it also mustn’t be a former comrade, because that could be considered a betrayal which might involve being outsmarted by him (see 5!).
- Cannot be white under any circumstances. That’s perpetuating the idea that white women are perfect!
But most of all, when designing your character, she CAN’T be a Mary Sue! That’s just degrading by assuming women have no flaws, so don’t you dare!
That’s probably true, but on the other hand, even smart advanced insights get shat on when presented on the internet.
Well, its still better than Twilight
btw, keep posting about her so we give her more fame, I know I will post in here from time to time just to keep it alive 
College isn’t a scam, per se, but it involves a lot of practices that are basically exploitative.
A scam is when you con someone into doing something for your benefit that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Exploitation is when someone has no practical choice but to do something, so you charge them up the ass for it.
what feminists like her don’t realize is that there will be people who have weaknesses and differences that they won’t agree with, but these weaknesses and differences don’t make you any less of a person.
they view them not as people anymore ,but as what they have judged them to be.
they are dehumanizing people when they feel they are trying to help which my biggest problem with this type of feminist.
To be honest her entire argument falls apart if you just bring up Xenosaga. The main protagonists in that are female as well as the main bad guys are male. Hell one of the main bad guys in the game Albedo is an emotional wreck and unstable MALE BAD GUY, something that is out of the norm for most male characters in games. The same thing goes for his brother Junior/Rubedo. KOSMOS the android in the game is also a very powerful fighter as well as being one of the few things in the universe to deal with the Gnosis threat. Only thing that she can perhaps bring up to counter this is the insane amount of “Les Yay” [lesbian subtext] trope between Shion and KOSMOS.
Another thing too is that in most Final Fantasy games, being a male is a disadvantage when you go into the whole “min/max” thing as certain items can only be equipped by females. Some of these items give insane amount of stats that it is just ridiculous. Also while the Disgaea series may typically show that the person you control is a male [Laharl/Mao], the females are the ones in the background actually progressing the storyline/manipulate the main character to do what they want [Etna/Flonne] as well as have more in-depth backgrounds than the actual main character.
Anita should review hentai games
she will go nuts
At first I thought this was just a matter of semantics so I didn’t reply, but you’re claiming that she tricked her donors, since they “otherwise wouldn’t” have donated. Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just assuming that they wouldn’t know about tv tropes (and the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between her videos and tv tropes is an unstated assumption here as well)? Maybe they don’t like tv tropes. Your original definition of scam being entirely dependent on the word free (which conveniently absolves anyone involved in the myriad movie remakes and rehashes a self-serving scammer, which they would be if you removed the word, or does it?-http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200041h.html) is a pretty arbitrary position. No doubt you’ll dismiss this as a terrible analogy because of style being important, but that actually weakens your position because there are clearly stylistic differences between her videos and the tv tropes website.
I think we all agree that donating more to a cause that exceeded its original goal by a factor of 20 or so is idiotic, and it’s idiotic to think that she’ll need 150 grand to make her video series and any decent person would use the profit for a good cause, but you’ve yet to show in any way that the donors were scammed. I can say that it’s idiotic to repeatedly watch essentially the same movie, and maybe it’s idiotic that I watch Freaks and Geeks about once a year, but we’re not being scammed. Sorry, but there are plenty of people who are scammed and it’s a serious and disgusting act. Her kickstarter page is crystal clear and she’s doing exactly what she said she would. Am I missing something? Does the amount donated not show up, so someone doesn’t know if their $20 makes it $6,000 or $60,000?
My “original definition of scam” is not According To Merriam Webster. It was a brief, snide quip–a dig at the fact that this scam involves getting people to pay for information that is already widely available for free. “Absolving” people for rehashing movies is addressed in a completely different post for completely different reasons, so let’s not conflate them.
(Though if you’d like, you can take a look at the movie thread to see what people, including me, think of filmmakers who truly retread old ground without including some substantially original element–be it formal, structural, thematic, whatever.)
Back to Anita Whatsername: I believe it was misleading for her to put her hand out with the justification that she intended to root out some original findings, new insight, whatever you want to call it, which—your mileage may vary, though we seem to agree on this part–it doesn’t appear that she did. I also believe that a lot of those people probably wouldn’t have forked over the money if they knew that what they were really in for, which was (being charitable) a less-than-essential repackaging of known data, and I believe that she probably knew she wouldn’t have gotten so many responses if she’d been more forthcoming about this. If you disagree with me on those points, that’s fine. I’m characterizing her as scummy here. I’m not accusing her of being Bernie Madoff.
I dismissed the analogy because style is important for relaying narrative. Maybe I was unclear about that, but rereading my original post, I don’t think I was. I won’t say that style is unimportant when relaying other kinds of information, but in those cases, it’s not about the artistic impulse so much as delivering the information in an immediate way that people can easily understand. In this, again, she’s not offering anything that isn’t already around in a dozen other formats that fulfill those criteria.
As for TV Tropes, I was only using that as one example and never claimed that there is a one-to-one correspondence between hers and any other ssingle source. I pretty clearly pointed out that the forms of delivery you can get the information in vary greatly. (Shall we include videos among them? Perhaps we shall.) Unless people believed they were simply buying the convenience of having some of this stuff repackaged and made available in a new location, her video is pure DiGiorno.
Like for DiGiorno.
And if it seems like I’m being extra-harsh on her… well, maybe I am, but it gets my goat when people appoint themselves as a spokesperson for a cause and then start doing some sketchy shit. It’s unbecoming.
Lost it at Digiorno. But I agree with goodm0ourning. Her second video was rather weak in trying to defend herself. I forgot which response video had it but it was the one with the Double Dragon chick punching the dude in the balls. Basically her reply to that was “well she only got to do that when she was saved.” /Jackie Chan WTF face.
Also in Xenogears, you find out that one of the main baddies is a FEMALE. It also takes a FEMALE to control the crazy EMOTIONAL backlash of the MALE protagonist as well. Oh Xeno series… you were so awesome.
The Borderlands 2 reference was also a huge stretch. If you’ve played that game, you’d know that “Nothing is more badass than treating a woman with respect”. And her example of Angel as a damsel completely ignored the fact that the other individual who was a damsel for most of the game was male.
Not to mention the fact that 99% of every nameless person you kill in Borderlands is a male, used simply to give the player something to head shot. What about them? Why is it that in most games virtually everyone you kill is male? Is this trying to send the message that it’s ok to kill guys?
It’s like she goes through games and takes out ANY account of a female having any sort of hardship and compiles them all to try and indicate a pattern.
No Xenogears is quite sexist since it pinpoints all of the world’s problems on a female, who basically gave birth to all of humanity on that planet. It goes back to the misogynistic view of the Bible of when Eve caused her and Adam to get kicked out of the garden! Xenogears is obviously saying women are the root of all the problems in the world. Also, there are bare breasts shown. Sexist as fuck. /AnitaLogic
I don’t think you’re being too harsh on her if she is in fact doing sketchy shit. I checked out her page and she never really claimed to be creating the seminal work on this topic, or that she wouldn’t be going over some old ground, which happens in any kind of analysis as long as it’s not unbelievably specific. I think there was an obvious understanding that she would be contributing at least something new in some sense, even if it’s just the superficial packaging - which I agree would be pretty disappointing if that’s all she does. But however you feel about that, people like having stuff repackaged in a convenient place, even if it’s of lesser quality; it’s Khan from Khan Academy’s whole schtick. All of that stuff is available in other places, in books written by actual experts (have you seen the MST3K style responses by experts to some of his videos? If not, they’re worth it, so consider that my new contribution and an apology for repeating myself ad nauseum here), although it may require a library visit or more than 5 minutes of online searching. I don’t know what you think of him (I think if people really do learn from him then he’s alright with me), but I wonder how many people who think Anita is a scammer think Khan is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I bet a lot.
I picture her donors as fans of her style who have seen her previous videos and know what they’re going to get. You can call them stupid, especially for giving her almost $160,000 (really, why the hell did they just keep on donating??), but I don’t think we can say they were misled so that’s where I’ll agree to disagree.
“Experts” in any field will always feel free to come and point out how some amateur is going it wrong. Mostly because they spent their time/money becoming experts instead of learning their field. We need to go back to the apprentice/master style of education instead of the “pay (forever) to play” model currently in place in the US.
/offtopic rant. :tup:
The plot in 50 shades of grey is basically this:
A young, attractive self made millionaire (male) has a kinky relationship with a 21 year old college student (female, the heroine of the book) and he buys her expensive shit like a car etc.
This book caters to women! Women fucking like this shit, hence the book’s massive popularity. This is their fantasy! Not to work hard and become successful and rich themselves, but to be with a successful man who will buy them stuff. The popularity of this book among women shows as clear as day that a lot of women would rather NOT be powerful and independent but to be taken care of, if only they had such an option.
Game fucking over. If anything, women need to fix themselves first instead of trying to fix videogame cutscenes.
You say that as though women are a monolithic entity who all share the same thoughts and views.