Substack Newsletter 2

Here to burgle your turts.

(One picture that took like 17 takes to get right: avoiding a finger in the frame and getting the right angle is difficult, and I see why The Youngs spend 45% of the day getting photos of themselves right.)

Last week I took a day and drove to Baltimore, for a video game and geek-rock music convention called Super MAGFest. I was scheduled to speak on Thursday night.

(I was going to post this on Tuesday, but…)             

What I PLANNED ON showing off was stuff like this – a TI994A computer on display with a crazypants round monitor that looks like it’s from Logan’s Run.

(The display text reads BUTTS LOL over and over. Thanks, MAGFEST attendee Tina Belcher!)

And fun cosplay like THIS: that’s Greg and Wort from Over the Garden Wall, a show my family has rewatched more than ESPN has replayed that Brazil goal against Serbia in the World Cup.

(And that’s a ROCK FACT.)

And stories of this great Danny DeVito shrine.

(There was also a Brendan Fraser shrine.)

But I’ve got another story instead.

Actual MAGFest was chill, but online MAGFest became disturbingly polarized over a joke.

These pop-up banners were all over the place, and most features winking jokes to pop culture.

(Funny!)

(Funny and true!)

Here’s the one that everyone talked about.

(The standing banner in question.)

Time to explain the joke. Kotaku is a news website that covers the world of video games. Last year, it criticized MAGFest because it occurred during a Covid spike, and there weren’t an outbreak of Omicron cases among attendees. MAGFest tried to handle it responsibly, making sure to tell everyone they may have been exposed and they needed to get tested. Kotaku joked about it in an NSFW headline.  

So this appeared to be someone from MAGFest throwing a punch back. (Note: for 2023 everyone had to show proof of vaccination and had to stay masked all weekend long.)

But the idea of “ethics in game journalism,” which this banner evokes, means something else. That was the catchphrase of Gamergate.

Gamergate was a series of attacks of women in gaming, by men in gaming, all in the name of “ethics in game journalism.” Women were harassed, and doxxed, for seeming no reason other than because men didn’t like their presence, and the men doing this claimed it was a manner of moral honor to treat women this way.

The sign was immediately taken down – I went up to take a picture of it around 11:30 am, and it was already vamoosed. And MAGFest apologized on Twitter for it. If you were there, you had no idea the sign ever existed.

But if you WEREN’T there, and you were following it via social media, the sign was the only thing you knew about the event. The joke got continual defenders, and anyone who pointed out its dog-whistle status was told they were too sensitive to take a joke.

I had some time, so I added my thoughts to the presentation I was going to make that evening. Partly I did this so I couldn’t squirm out of it, since I had no idea how the crowd would take it.

Here are my remarks, preserved in a Reddit thread. (It was immediately downvoted to oblivion by the same online people who said the joke should remain up.) I was bolstered to hear people actually applaud at the end, instead of storm out.

All big meetings of people are similar, regardless of who they are or why they’re meeting, a Boy Scouts Jubilee, a comic book convention, a HVAC trade show, a craft fair – they all have loads of people with overlapping interest. It’s like those overlays in a biology textbook showing off the skeletal and GI tract and nervous system.

Social media is a recent but now perpetual overlay, one in many ways unrelated to the rest of the whole. Your experience at a meeting might have almost no correlation to a nonattendee’s experience viewing pictures of tweets of the event.

Most people in the world are kind and caring and just trying to get by and have some fun without hurting anyone else. Not everyone is that way, of course. But just because they’re vocal doesn’t mean they hold quorum over the plurality. We’re mostly good apples here.

(bullet) Reddit post of the week: thanks to user u/brady160 for realizing you can switch the names around of the nine Star Wars films, and each one fits the storyline as well or better than the original name.

Episode I: A New Hope

Episode II: Rise of Skywalker

Episode III: Attack of the Clones

Episode IV: The Force Awakens

Episode V: Revenge of the Sith

Episode VI: The Last Jedi

Episode VII: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode VIII: Return of the Jedi

Episode IX: The Phantom Menace

(bullet) We went all week in the House of Representatives trying to elect a speaker who, since he had more than enough members of his own party, should have been a shoo-in. the last time this happened was 1958. That’s where Abraham Lincoln’s famous House Divided speech came from. Which I then borrowed for mouse-pun purposes.

(Bullet) Dave Steed guessed that one of the 2023 books coming out was about the Power Rnagers. I actually know shockingly little about the Power Rangers; I was one year too young to get into the craze as a kid. Never seen the show or the movies, or played with a toy. I may end up talking myself INTO reading a book about the Power Rangers, since I’m tabula rasa over here.

(Bullet) Next week, as promises for two weeks now, The United States of Costner!