Jim Sterling

I love the new “war on marriage” thing because it brings it back to what this anti-gay stuff has always been about — ego. When you say there’s a war on marriage, you imply that the world cares about your personal life as much as you care about the lives of gay people, and deep down, you fucking love that. 

After all, that’s where this whole “traditional marriage” thing stems from. A self-inflated sense of entitlement. You want something that’s just for you, and you don’t want those “other folks” to have it. When someone suggests everybody should have it, you scream “NO FAIR” and act like you’re being attacked, all the while reveling in your own self pity. 

You’re always looking to be the martyr, and the victim, because you’re secretly jealous of people who actually *are* victimized. You want to feel special like them, which is why you JUMP at the opportunity to pretend you’re marginalized and oppressed. From the “war on Christmas” to the “protection of dem dere Muslims” to this new “letting people who aren’t me do things I don’t have to see is an ATTACK ON MY FAMILY,” every single fucking right-wing grievance in America of late seems to be a privileged majority acting like the afflicted underclass. 

It’s pathetic. It’s disgusting. It’s childish. It’s a small boy feeling jealous because his sick brother is getting more attention than him. 

There were actual martyrs throughout history. People who died for their beliefs. Suffered torture for their beliefs. When I think about such men and women, the current wave of self-congratulatory affectations of suffering from the dominant classes in America leaves a taste in my mouth so bitter I feel like my tongue’s jammed five feet inside a horse’s anus. If you had the ability to self-assess, and rationalize, and see what you look like when you play the martyr in a society that almost explicitly caters itself to your belief system, I believe the shame you’d feel is beyond comprehension. You should be ashamed of yourself for suggesting there’s a war against you and the beliefs you have tried to impose on society through government and law. 

History will look back on you and see you for the ignorant, petulant, mealy-mouthed little toddlers that you are, mark my words. They’ll see this “war on marriage” and laugh at it, the same way they laugh at medieval peasants tossing women in the river to see if they’re witches. My only regret is I won’t be there to laugh, because I’m stuck in the new medieval with pricks like you. 

Enjoy your little war. I know you will. Deep down, you’re going to fucking adore this, just like you adore every little war your diseased brains conjure up.  

Not really done any personal blogging this week as it was quite a busy period, what with most of the Destructoid staff at GDC. Seems like it was quite an event this year. I might go next time, if I can get the time to travel. 

Anyway, I did some bullshit on the Internet, as per usual. 

By far the most extensive work I did involved my extensive coverage of Blades of Time. All the posts are tagged, so you can read them right here. This is an action game, a spiritual successor to the unremarkable X-Blades. From those who have played it, it’s actually not a bad game, which makes Konami’s silence all the more confusing. As you’ll see from my posts, Konami completely screwed this game up. Barely any marketing, retailers confused over release dates, and the producer not even being able to find the thing in stores. 

I’m having fun with the coverage, trying to highlight Konami’s behavior in a satirical way, but I am genuinely disappointed in the company. It has gone off the deep end with several of its games lately, and to the outside observer, Konami looks like it doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore. It’s exasperating to see, as someone who counts himself as a diehard fan of several Konami franchises. 

I’ve thus far been unable to find a copy to purchase, and Konami has not responded to a review copy request. Yeah … fucking ridiculous. 

This week’s Jimquisition was a more serious followup to my previous episode on gay romance options in Mass Effect 3. Erotic fanfiction was deemed too subtle for some viewers, so I put all my gay cards on the gay table this time. I think the message was received. 

I continued my Mass Effect 3 observations on GameFront, with an examination of the insane nerd rage that accompanied BioWare’s latest release. This accompanied a post on Destructoid, where I looked at the Metacritic user review backlash. 

Also, we put out perhaps my favorite Podtoid in a long, long time. On this past week’s episode, I planned Jonathan Holmes’ funeral and we talked about running our very own hibachi restaurant. I think the show’s kept up the pace quite nicely, despite the sad loss of Max as co-host. Should be even more interesting once we get some guests on (currently chatting with Irrational about a Ken Levine appearance!)

That was the most notable junk I did, though of course keep reading Dtoid and GameFront for further garbage from me. 

Here’s that blog piece I wrote on GameFront that went up after I did my roundup. I’m quite proud of it so I’m giving it its own extra little plug. 

Questionable Religious Content. 

It’s about Nintendo refusing to allow Binding of Isaac on its 3DS eShop, and the wider issue of religion in videogames. 

For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to alter how I work a little bit, especially at Destructoid. I’ve made an effort to write less daily news posts, and do more original work. No hard-hitting journalism (pfft), but interesting observations, things to get people talking, and that sort of shit. I’ve been trying to see opportunities for articles that people wouldn’t ordinarily think of, and I feel it’s been paying off. 

This week, I’ve written about a few diverse subjects. The big one was that whole fighting game community sexual harassment deal. It’s interesting how many FGC members saw it as an attack, which it certainly wasn’t supposed to be. I still maintain that I was impressed by how many FGC members stood up and said, “This behavior isn’t what we’re into.” Still, there were many others trying to push the stereotype that the FGC is into that, which was quite sad. In any case, interesting discussions were had, I think.

Although many people challenged me to write more about the FGC, the amount of people who quite venomously don’t want any mainstream coverage puts me quite off. 

I had more fun writing about Blades of Time, a game that’s releasing next week and that Konami has almost entirely refused to promote. When you find out some of the game’s details, and just how little the title’s been acknowledged, it’s quite amazing. Speaking of which, I also responded to the astounding level of backlash Konami’s getting for Silent Hill: Book of Memories. People are viciously dogpiling on that, and I can’t say I’m totally shocked. It’s a weird departure for the series, though I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a good game. Finally, I poked fun at myself and fellow reviewers for using the word “experience” way too much when writing. 

That’s an example of the kind of thing I want to start bringing more of to Destructoid. Not news posts, and not exactly features. Just interesting things I’ve noticed, be they humorous or serious. It’s certainly been rewarding bringing more individual content to the site. 

That’s not all I did at Dtoid this week. Reviews went up for Binary Domain and Journey. Liked ‘em both! It’s been a long time since I’ve had a “review controversy,” and I am rather enjoying the respite. Even my negative reviews lately have only had one or two lunatics throwing around accusations. I wonder how long the calm will last. 

Oh, and then there’s Podtoid, of course. 

I won’t go through everything I did for GameFront, as there’s a lot, but I did a nice thing about Facebook gaming this week. I have a really passionate article prepared but it’s not been published yet. Hoping it goes up today. 

Let’s round things out with this week’s Jimquisition, which proved to be quite the tongue-wagger. It was a simple reading of the Mass Effect 3 erotic fan fiction I wrote, parodying the drama over gay romance options in the game. I didn’t quite expect discussion to explode so readily, and I didn’t expect to be so shocked by some of the responses. The next Jimquisition will continue the discussion, and it’s going to be quite spirited. 

So that’ll be fun!

One Million Moms is all upset because some Toys R’ Us stores are selling an Archie comic with a picture of a same-sex marriage on the front cover. OH NOS! I love this comment from the group though:

This is the last place a parent would expect to be confronted with questions from their children on topics that are too complicated for them to understand. 

I love it because I choose to read it as the parents being the ones who cannot understand such a “complex” issue as same-sex marriage. This is clearly the case, since a fucking idiot can grasp the concept of homosexuality, and it doesn’t take an educated professor to explain what it is. It is only complicated to morons, such as the spokespeople for One Million Moms, who think TELLING KIDS FACTS IS SO HURRRRD!

If your chief concern with any subject is the fear that you’re going to be asked a question by your own kid, you are an unfit parent and a fucking selfish person, to boot. Your child is curious, it deserves to know about the world, and your responsibility, as a parent, is to let your kid know about it, to prepare him or her for it, AND to let that child have all the facts with which to form its individual view of the world. To provide any less is to do your child a disservice. It disgusts me that One Million Moms criticizes Toys R’ Us for not being “responsible,” when it’s doing more to educate kids about reality than these bullshit parents are. 

A child lives in my house. He is my stepson. He’s currently eight years old and he perfectly understands what homosexuality is. He knows this because his mother explained it to him, which was about as difficult as explaining how to spell “dog.” If the concept of homosexuality is so complex that you do not know how to describe it to a child, then what the fuck are you doing with a kid in the first place? I don’t think you have the mental faculties to raise one correctly. 

Ironically, comments such as these typically come from conservative Christians (which OMM is certainly made up of), who think explaining a gay marriage is too complex, yet have no problem telling a child that an omniscient deity caused a virgin to give birth to a magical son who was also the deity so that he could grow up to be killed in order to exploit a loophole in a rule laid forth by the deity that could have been abolished if the deity so willed it but he didn’t for reasons unexplained, so instead gave birth to himself so he could trick people into killing him so that he didn’t have to kill the people he tricked into killing him. 

And THAT, according to this offshoot of the uber-Christian American Family Association, is simpler than just telling a kid, “Sometimes a man or woman can fall in love with another man or woman. It happens. There you go.”

I’m not one to get emotional about children, usually, but I actually felt tears welling in my eyes last night when my stepson said, “I don’t hate anyone. I don’t hate gay people, I don’t hate black people.” I couldn’t be more happy to hear a child in Mississippi say that. That’s the start of a good person right there. 

Hey, One Million Moms? Yeah, my kid’s better than your kids. I know this for a fact, because he’s not been raised by a fucking dumbass and at eight years old he’s more reasonable and intelligent than you, as ADULTS, are. 

I feel sorry for the sheltered children you are raising to be as dumb as you are.

Our need to turn other humans into monsters has always fascinated me. It’s a theme I like to explore in the fiction I work on (that I never get around to bloody finishing). It’s so common for people to refer to serial killers and other horrifying criminals as “freaks” or “animals” or whatever, but I think we do that to try and deny the fact that human beings are capable of atrocious things.

My lovely wife Alex recently commented on this issue and it inspired me to blog about it. Hitler was notoriously fond of comedies, especially those by Charlie Chaplin. By all accounts, the world’s most notorious genocidal dictator had a goofy sense of humor, and that doesn’t sit well with some people. It makes him human. 

This was evidenced in a comment Alex saw, in which somebody said:

“It may be true that Hitler got a laugh from Charlie Chaplin….but the truth is that that filthy Hun loved no one and nobody and was one of the most vile, despicable, pathetic excuses for a human being who ever lived on our planet.Please, for the sakes of those who DIED because of Hitler, get interested in someone else other than that vile monster.”

The above statement is simply incorrect. Hitler did love things. He was a vegan, he had a girlfriend, he can be seen in photographs and movies having a genuine laugh. He had hobbies and interests, just like we do. By all accounts, he was not an alien creature and it doesn’t seem likely that he was even a sociopath. He was a passionate man who was also fucking wrong about everything he believed in and did horrible, awful, terrible things. Was he a prick? Of course he was. But he wasn’t a monster. That implies he was something other than human. 

It makes us feel better about ourselves to deny that any part of us could exist in any part of a serial killer, or a genocidal dictator. If you can view Hitler as an inhuman monster, you don’t feel any responsibility as a human for what he ever did. You don’t have to worry about someone like that existing in your society and affecting your family. After all, it’s easy to tell a Hitler from a Mr. Rogers.

You don’t have to look at yourself and consider what you might be capable of if pushed to an extreme. 

We think we’d just “know” who’s a villain and who’s a saint, but we don’t. You can’t tell the difference between a genocidal madman and a childrens’ entertainer, because they’re both humans and anatomically resemble each other perfectly. Hell, John Wayne Gacy was a killer and a childrens’ entertainer, and while everybody can look at a photo of him dressed like a clown now and claim it’s “obvious” that he was evil, we only say that in hindsight. When he was just John Wayne Gacy the family man, nobody saw anything wrong with him dressed as a clown. We only look back on him and say he looks monstrous now because we *know* what he did. 

It’s irresponsible for us to call any other human being a monster. It denies what humanity is capable of, what real people are capable of doing to other real people. It reinforces the idea of there being an “Other,” a thing that is different from you, and couldn’t possibly bear any similarity to you, lest you admit that you might be capable of whatever “inhuman” behavior it exhibits. 

It’s also the way Hitler saw the Jews, and the way radical Christians see gay people. So yeah … maybe don’t have that attitude. 

Serial killers are people too. That doesn’t mean we need to spare them the rod, and that doesn’t mean we need to validate what they’ve done. But it does mean we have to accept that human beings are not paragons of virtue to the point where only an alien beast could do the things that many, many humans have done … and that possibly more humans would do if there weren’t laws keeping a lot of them fearful of retribution. 

It is conceited and arrogant to think that a criminal is so vastly different from the rest of us. It’s also dangerous, because it makes us feel safe and complacent, and denies the need for us to be careful about our own behavior. 

Jeff Dunham’s the only special case. It’s clear that he’s a monster. 

This week I started a new job. Kind of, anyway. I haven’t lost my old one and I’m really just extending things I’ve already been doing for the past year, but it definitely feels like I’ve doubled my workload, so I shall crack on that I’ve started a new job. 

I’ll be contributing to GameFront on a daily basis now, as some readers might have begun to notice. Once per weekday, I’ll be posting a single PC-related post, tossing up anything interesting that tickles my fancy. I’ll also be posting my usual [/RANT] column on a Wednesday, as well as a PC-themed RANT.EXE on Thursday. On Friday, I’ll be posting an article about my adventures with a particular title from Good Old Games’ catalog of titles. 

This in no way will affect my existing work at Destructoid, where I’ll still be posting my usual selection of punditry, reviews, and original nonsense. I have been asked before to quit my job at Destructoid and go work for people on an exclusive basis, but that has simply never been a deal with me. If anybody wants my services, they need to understand that Destructoid is my first concern, and anything else I do has to fit around it. GameFront was very understanding of that, and I am not producing anything for Break Media that I’d produce for Destructoid. Two different outlets, two different focuses, two different types of content. 

GameFront is aiming to become a more dedicated PC-based outlet and the guys in charge have a strong idea of what it wants to be. As a guy who has been doing this job for quite some time, I relish the opportunity to help build up another brand into something competitive. Destructoid’s grown and grown into something uniquely powerful, and I am proud as pigfuckery to be associated with it. I’m interested to see if GameFront can do the same. In any case, if you happen to enjoy my work, I’d suggest you add the site to your usual visiting rounds, just to see a little bit more of my useless shite. Sorry … I mean, “unique insight.”

I enjoy being busy and I enjoy being able to work and provide for my family while doing something I love. I’m very grateful for it, and to everybody who reads my stuff, watches my videos, and allows me to continue. So thanks for that!

Another week has passed and I’ve spilled more sticky garbage onto the Internet. Here’s the most notable stuff I did this week. 

I kicked off Monday with a Jimquisition about the digital age. I used to fear an era of digital videogame distribution, but now I relish the idea of such a time. I think major publishers won’t find it’s the all-your-can-eat buffet they believe it to be. 

Over on GameFront, I continued the digital sentiment by telling you why Double Fine’s Kickstarter success is so exciting, even if you’re cynical about Kickstarter’s potential influence. There’s a lot more at play than just Kickstarter, and we need to look at the bigger picture. 

This week, Destructoid went apeshit with PS Vita coverage, and I spunked up quite a few reviews alongside editor-in-chief Dale North. A compilation post contains handy links to all our reviews. There are even more reviews coming, so be excited for that! I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll get a great Vita game, as I seem to have drawn the short straw and gotten most of the shit ones. Such is the life of a reviewer of the videogames!

You can also check out ten whining little nitpicks concerning the Vita. I really like the system, but nothing is perfect. 

Still with Dtoid, I did a couple of mini features/rants this week. First up, I spoke about this obsession gamers have with replay value and length. I then took Ubisoft to task for trying to swindle PS Vita users. All this was before I exposed ALL Sony fans as scumbags, with scientific evidence. 

Finally, there was not one, but TWO Podtoids this week. The first was a romantic episode with Jonathan Holmes. The second was a special bonus episode in which I chatted to David Jaffe about the used game market. It’s a pretty awesome little debate, and well worth hearing for anyone who cares about game consumer issues. 

That’s all the interesting stuff I did. Hooray!