more about the olympics

I think what really got the goat this time was the story about the switch-up between the two girls for the opening ceremony. Supposedly Lin Miaoke was more attractive than Yan Peiyi, so Lin Miaoke mimed the song “ode to the motherland” for the opening ceremony whilst the real singing voice was recorded by Yang Peiyi.

[...] What I think is truly despicable about the whole thing, regardless of how Yang Peiyi feels about it — is that this makes a farce of the modern concept of the Olympics.

Athletes gathered here from around the world to participate in competitions to see who is the best. This is a gathering designed, not only to see who is the best, but to give recognition to the best.

For me, the idea of not giving due recognition to someone at the Olympics just goes against the grain.

Kyrias, as promised.

Recently our expectations of coverage of women have been lowered, nullified; we have become used to seeing that strange category - celebrity women - pictured constantly, relentlessly, their image before us for no other reason than that they happen to have headed out for a pint of milk with their makeup on skew-whiff. At Beijing we have seen the antithesis of that - we have been treated to the sight of ordinary women reaching extraordinary heights. The women we have been thrilling to aren't in our eyeline because they happen to be the offspring of some 1970s rocker, or because they've bagged a multimillionaire boyfriend. They aren't on screen because they have starved themselves to a size zero - instead, their bodies are a celebration of strength.

From the Grauniad - h/t to the red one: it's a great article, one that meanders through sport and media and celebrity culture, and you all should go read. Viv.id disagrees:

A couple of years ago, Tigtog posted about athletlcs uniforms and the trend toward sexified, midriff-baring, underwear-style women’s uniforms. ...Minute increases in performance cannot account for this difference, otherwise the men would be in skintight clothing also.

No. It’s not about faster, higher, stronger. Women in sports are promoted as sexualised bodies for ogling; men are promoted as performers.

Viv.id have comparison photos of male and female team costumes for various sports - and prove that the difference was not marked in the 1980s. h/t to a comment at Shameless. (false advertising: that Shameless post is totally not shameless. But thanks for that photo!)

Also, Ren brings the boycandy.

on presentational devices at your precious non-politicised Olympic Games

Feng Silu, another volunteer, says they have gone through rigid training to achieve perfection. During the training sessions, they have to stand in five to six-inch heels with their jaws tucked in while balancing a 16-page book on their head and keeping a sheet of paper between their knees, for at least an hour at a time. If either object fell or slipped from place, they would have to start the exercise all over again.

"We only take a few minutes' rest every a couple of hours. You know, we need to adjust our pace and stride constantly to achieve perfection. When it was break time, even bending my legs hurt. And as we have our stockings on during training, we may wear out two or three pairs each day."

From CRIEnglish. (h/t Kyrias, who has promised a post on this in the near future. [edit: It's here.]

Wearing a red dress and pigtails, Lin Miaoke charmed a worldwide audience with a rendition of "Ode to the Motherland".

But the singer was Yang Peiyi, who was not allowed to appear because she is not as "flawless" as nine-year-old Lin.

The show's musical director said Lin was used because it was in the best interests of the country.

From the Beeb, with pictures of the two children.


Marina Hyde, for the most part, wrote the Olympics post I didn't want to:

Amazingly, it's not even the IOC's most unedifying moment of the past fortnight. That honour belongs to their decision to suspend the entire Iraqi Olympic team on the basis that the country's National Olympic Committee had not been properly recognised by the IOC. Clearly, Iraq's real crime was not having the right paperwork, though before rescinding the ban on some (but not all) of the athletes, the IOC chuntered that it was because of suspicions of "political interference in the Olympic movement".

Last week I asked them to clarify why they had never suspected political interference when one Uday Hussein was chairman of the NOC. Unfortunately, they were far too grand to comment, but having since read senior IOC member Dick Pound's book, I discover that they couldn't be sure that Uday was a political placeman. Thank God they didn't put two and two together and make five.

Instead, they focus on issuing directives forbidding athletes from making any political statements. Surely it's time the IOC re-examined their definition of what it means to be political. It seems entirely acceptable for states to politicise the games by using them as propaganda, and for corporations to do the same (22 years of McDonald's sponsorship feels faintly agenda-driven). Only the athletes are warned not to step out of line.

Priorities being what they are, the IOC did not bother to issue similar directives instructing China not to bulldoze homes to make way for the new Beijing. And yet they must have known this would happen, as so many games have been preceded by what we might euphemistically describe as a tidying away of humans who don't match the decor. Consider Mexico City, where police opened fire and killed hundreds of student protesters; or Atlanta, where the organising committee actually built the jail to which many people who committed new offences on the city statute book - like lying down in the street - were dispatched.

Does Equality Pay Its Bills?

Big question. When you pass by equality trainwrecks on the internets, you sometimes see a blind faith in the free market to solve all our problems. I mean, the free market (which exists, honest) being the bastion of efficiency it is, if a problem still exists it must be because there's an economic upside to it, right? If action films with female leads were profitable, there'd be tons of them, but there aren't because it's just not profitable. If women's work was really as valuable as men's work, employers wouldn't discriminate against women, would they?

This faith seems to underlie a lot of the outright disbelief you sometimes meet when you talk to people about equal pay or media sexism. It's basically saying that the desire to make a profit is so great it must override the desire to be sexist, so sexism can't be occurring at the expense of profit, and any further attempts to fight sexism will cause economic harm.

FSF recently linked to a series of articles by Jennifer Kesler about how this blind faith applies wrt the Bechdel Test. One of these directly asks Why Discriminate If It Doesn't Profit?

What tipped me off was that whenever film students pointed out how movies/shows for, by or about women had indeed profited, film professionals wouldn’t hear it. Those movies/shows were exceptions! Or it was really the alien/Terminator/Hannibal Lechter people wanted to see, not Ripley, Connor or Starling. Etc. It couldn’t be that people were actually happy to see movies/shows for, by or about women, because that was impossible - end of argument.

...people who claim to worship profit above all else sometimes actually worship what they want to believe is profitable.

Looking at the inflation-adjusted all-time box office, many of the top names are films that had a specific appeal to female audiences; Gone With The Wind, Titanic, The Sound Of Music, Doctor Zhivago. Three of these four were made a rather long time ago.

I'm not sold on Kelsey's reasoning simply because it relies on pathologising individuals; see her earlier post, Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test:

I concluded Hollywood was was dominated by perpetual pre-adolescent boys making the movies they wanted to see, and using the “target audience” - a construct based on partial truths and twisted math - to perpetuate their own desires.

I find it hard to believe that mere individuals can keep that shit running as long as they do, but does anyone have a better theory? It's important, this. Because the phenomenon goes beyond Hollywood and infests the real world.


Last year, Slate's Ray Fishman declared 'It Takes a Village...to fail to thank its female leader, no matter how good she is':

Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

[...] They were also less corrupt—villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.

It's like Hollywood; however well the women perform, it doesn't register with the people who care. (Except that US cinema audiences seem to approve plenty). This really is sexism as a quantifiable pathology, and it merrily flies in the face of any desire for material gain; women suck, no matter how much they've improved your local governance.

Then there's a straightforward headline from workforce.com: Firms With More Women on Boards Perform Better Than Those That Don’t.

During the four-year span of the reporting for the study, Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of women on their boards saw equity returns that were 53 percent higher than those companies with the fewest number of women on their boards.

I strongly doubt that either this or the India survey demonstrate any female superiority when it comes to governance; rather, they represent the replacing of mediocre men with brilliant women who in other circumstances are locked out of high places. But the question's still there - if female board members have such a marked effect on profits, why are there so few of them?

If hiring women is basically a way of getting free money, why are so many companies scared of the idea?


When talking about the pay gap, I tend to link to this: the story of the UK's largest ever equal pay settlement:

Early last year, 1,600 women, all of them health workers at two Cumbrian hospitals, won the biggest ever equal pay deal: a total of £300m. At a time when the pay gap between men and women is actually growing, the settlement should have sparked a clamour for equality. Instead, there has since been an eerie silence. The story of how the women, underpaid for years, spurned an offer of £1.5m compensation and achieved £300m, all from one health authority, has been mysteriously buried, as if it were an embarrassment. They sense a fear of "mutually assured destruction" wafting around the headquarters of their union, Unison, which represents more than a million public service workers: a feeling that the settlement was too huge, and the ramifications of it just too enormous - what would happen if it triggered equal pay claims across the whole of the public sector?

[...] The claim was possible because of "equal value", a concept contained in a European directive announced during a late sitting in the Commons 20 years ago by a reluctant, and drunk, employment minister, Alan Clark. It allows different jobs to be compared for skill, complexity and responsibility; it focuses on the work, not the job. In detail, the claim translated the gothic arithmetic and arcane patois of industrial relations into the everyday life of men and women: everything, from bonus, to pension, to the length of the working week, to a working life. "It took a while to convince some of them that what they did was not only of equal value to a man, but more important," says Doyle.

A job evaluation expert, Sue Hastings, assessed the Cumbria dossier and reported that the cases were a golden equal pay opportunity for "exactly the people who ought to get it" - nurses who had been undergraded for decades, cleaners, telephonists and sterile services staff, who prepare instruments for surgery and who had been stuck on the same grade as washers-up since the health service was founded. Doyle had found men willing to stand as comparators: a wall-washer earning £3,000 a year more - and working 104 fewer hours a year - than a seamstress and sterile services staff; a plumber earning more than a nurse; a specialised nurse on a cancer ward, at the top of her scale, earning £8,000 a year less than a plant maintenance man; a nurse on £9,000 less than an engineer.

My suspicion is that the fear of equal pay claims - as in Hollywood - is entirely real; equal pay for equal work means that men will have to take home less, one way or another. Councils in the UK - who finally implemented their equal pay agreements in 2006 - complained that they need central government assistance in order to pay women what their work was really worth. Boo fucking hoo; progressive taxation (as if that existed) passes money from wealthier men to poorer women, cry me a river. Hollywood? Would probably get more money overall if it stopped failing so often. But less of it would go to men. And that would somehow be so threatening it's worth paying to make it go away.


How far does the threat go? Well, the NYT is calling bullshit on the different ways we frame men at home vs. women at home here:

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

It goes back to families and parenting. It usually does.

a meme of linklove

[something is up with my last post; I can choose between either having it appear on the front page twice (but with the same article address, and the same comments page, appearing both times), or having a comments page that fails to work at all. Sorries.]

Daisy gave me a Brilliante Weblog badge. Here it is:



Unfortunately it comes with RULES. Rules:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you. (Daisy!)
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Add links to these blogs on your blog.
5. Leave a message for your nominee on their blog.

Yey chain mail. Except, these are lovely blogs that everyone should read, and I have recently had a giant traffic spike (due to that post, no surprises there), and I want to share the clicky, clicky love:

Combat Queer is my newest blogcrush. She updates more or less daily - about being trans in the US military, about her Christianity, about the election, and about anything else that's crossed her path.

V at learnalilgivinanlovin needs to update more. >: She's a doctoral student in clinical psych and writes about mental health and about race in Australia, about her upcoming marriage and many other things.

Kyrias/Kyraninse/she of many names at Acceptable Hypocrisy is another daily updater. She hops about from food, to tech, to race and gender issues, to day-to-day thrills and spills.

Dw3t-Hthr at Letters From Gehenna, I dunno where to begin summing up. It is all one thing, and it winds through feminism, Kemetism and Feri, BDSM, mental health and her experience of feeling 'alien'. It's a very close-to-the-bone blog, and her voice is stronger than most.

Radical Masculinity is another that does not update enough :( but when it does, it is good, very much so. Gauge writes about gender theory on the F2M spectrum, and about what feminism looks like from a masculine/genderqueer perspective.

I love Kaleidoglide. Not just for the cute pictures of men.

And a seventh? I could tag Daisy again but that would SO be cheating. I could gesticulate wildly at the blue person's cute pictures of Scotland and other places he is going. I could also demand that the green person updates her blog. :O

But no: the seventh shall be Alis Dee, who writes lots of smart tech and pop-culture stuffs, and also has the best del.ico.us/Twitter LJ feed ever. Mentioning those others was just me cheating.

that one non-post about Wimbledon

Sometimes when you're writing blog post drafts, you realise they're just burying other drafts. This one I abandoned due to pure derailment (more on that in a moment), but I think it deserves to live.

Coverage of women's sport does, as with most coverage of women's anything, suck. Most often it's not there much at all, but then you get blessed lovely Wimbledon, in which it is there and is often cringe-worthy. Last year the blue person (with a wee bit of help from me) made a beautiful collection of the worst of the worst Wimbledon online news (locked away on Livejournal, gah [edit: It's here, so go read]), and I intended to reprise that this year.

Except:
a) many news sites were so turned on by gorgeous, fabulous Rafa that they reverted to Option 1 - not covering the women's game so much.
b) it was genuinely better. For real. I think this is partly because the worst reporting last year was about Marion Bartoli, who had the gall to play in the final in spite of not being thin. This wasn't just mean-spirited of her, but actually affronting to the laws of nature and acres of newsprint were devoted to the question of how it had happened and how it could be prevented in the future.
c) I was derailed by the discovery that by far the most stupid thing said all fortnight was by one of the female players.

Friends, I give you Sveltlana Kuznetsova, the dimmest bulb in the entire box.

...behind her on the players' terrace there is a commotion, as a posse of photographers cluster around Serena Williams. I have heard that she and Serena are good friends, I say. “Yes, we text. We go out sometimes. I have big respect for African (-American) people. I think I was black in a past life, because I feel so much for African culture. I tell Serena that I want her hair, to have corn rows like her. She laughs at me. She says we all wish for what we don't have. But she teaches me some slang, and shows me dance moves.” A delighted laugh. “I can't shake my body like African people.”

Wow.


For what it's worth, here's a few more:

At The Independent, Paul Newmanat has made his tennis article contain as little tennis as possible. Instead, he faithfully regales us with Venus Williams's comments about...get this...food and babies. They are not even comments about eating babies, which would at least have been more entertaining than this trash.

And the Indy crowns itself as my new least favourite sports site with this from Tim Glover:

Equal pay isn't fair play [...] yesterday's winner in the family affair that was Williams v Williams walked away with prize money of £750,000, the sum that will be earned – really earned – by the men's singles champion today. Parity? It's nice work if you can get it, although for most of the time it can hardly be described in the women's game as work.

At The Times, the women's game is 'tame' and Venus and Serena Williams only reached the final because other players 'the top seeds at Wimbledon capitulated one by one and handed the trophy and the prizemoney to the Williams sisters'. [Fact: black women never deserve anything they've fought for. MOW keeps pointing this meme out.] Fortunately two commenters call Nick Pitt on his bullshit; 'didnt the same two guys play the final before. Didn't the women have upsets all through the two weeks. When this happens to the men it's exciting.'; 'Djokovic and Roddick lost early too. Does that mean men's tennis is in "trouble" ? Serve and volley? Few men play it anymore either.'

Over at the Daily Telegraph, Venus Williams is no longer a woman:

Venus' serve alone would have blown a few hats off in the Royal Box, and it was almost like watching the men's final on a Saturday. Not for nothing are they sometimes referred to as the Williams brothers.

More wow.

The Guardian's David Mitchell is brutally honest about the sexualisation of women's tennis, but is oblivious to the crap behind it:

Ana Ivanovic caused quite a stir at Wimbledon before being knocked out, largely because she's pretty. This has a particularly amusing effect on the BBC's ageing male commentators, who struggle to find a way to refer to the fact without saying anything sleazy. Their discomfort is palpable as they struggle with phrases like "very mobile and athletic", "nice dress", "young lady" and even "lights up the court". They're like tremulous uncles, weary and nervous of their own arousal.

They know they've got to mention it, you see - it's good for the business that is women's tennis. So they've got to say something but they know it mustn't be "I, for one, would like to bang her!" or "What's great about a player like Ivanovic is that she attracts a lot of teenage wankers as well as the tennis fans". They don't want metaphorical jizz on everyone's mental centre court but, at the same time, they know that, if the internet's taught us anything, it's not to underestimate the masturbatory pound.

Did you hear that subtext? Yes, yes, straight women don't masturbate. I guess Sue Barker's constant drooling over Roger Federer is representative of some phenomenon unknown to science.

on dickwads:

I'm a bit late on this one, but Ren and Belle are spreading word about Kyle Payne, who is a blogger - a man who both blogs and does IRL conference stuff against pornography - who has pleaded guilty to breaking into a woman's bedroom, assaulting her and taking nude photographs of her in her sleep. He is still merrily blogging away, and presumably will continue to do so until he gets put away. What. As Belle reports, he is facing an open sentencing at Buena Vista County Courthouse, Storm Lake, Iowa on August 11th. If you live nearby, you might want to show up and have your word on that.


Someone else is being a dickwad lately: Obama and a supporter of his, comedian Bernie Mac. Lisa K is just plain mad about this. Gina brings the context:

Most Black women know that the standard fare for African American comedians is anti-Black woman attacks. It is always acceptable to make us the butt of their jokes. They usually get a pass however by the Black community, because the people they are insulting are Black women and nobody really cares about us anyway. No Black woman is immune from the anti-Black woman musing of these Black comedians, not even a potential Black First Lady, afterall, she’s a Black woman, and nobody really cares about us anyway. The only people that get into hot water for disparaging Black women are White people.

[...]Let’s be clear, Bernie Mac didn’t get shouted down because of his sexism, he got shouted down because he embarrassed Barack Obama. Sexism and misogyny by Black entertainers is permitted and even rewarded. It was refreshing to see someone confront it, whatever the reason. They were right, implying that Black women are inherently unsuitable to serve as First Lady of the United States of America is not funny to me.

I am avoiding most threads about this one; my fee-fees, they are slighted. (Yeah, pass me a hanky). But ultimately I'm reminded of Obama's early ties to gay-bashing preachers - something that put me off a lot at the time but later became a 'teachable moment', and also a tool with which to extract promises and declarations of tolerance. (Promises. Declarations. Yeah.)

My fee-fees. But get down to blood and bone and there's something that matters far more; Iraq, and the continuing and consistent commitment to getting out. A commitment to not continuing, or repeating, such massive bloodshed and extortion. I'm going to c/p from a MoveOn mailing here, even though I hate their tone, because it has all the important bits in it:

Iraqis want U.S. Troops out. No one was expecting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to speak up in favor of withdrawal—after all, he's close with the Bush administration. But with elections in Iraq coming up, and a great majority of Iraqis opposed to a prolonged U.S. occupation, Maliki can't afford to toe the Bush line. So he's surprised everyone by standing up this week for a timetable for troop withdrawals and a date certain to end the war. The LA Times headline reads, "Iraqi prime minister advocates withdrawal timeline."

As a result, the "endless war agreement" Bush has been pushing fell through. Since January, hundreds of thousands of us pushed Congress to stand up to President Bush's proposed treaty with Iraq, which would have tied the next President's hands and made it much harder to get out. This week, the Washington Post reported that that agreement has fallen through—Iraqi leaders are putting their feet down and demanding a much shorter agreement.

And now even the Pentagon is considering faster timelines. According to reporter Michael Hirsh at Newsweek, "a forthcoming Pentagon-sponsored report" will recommend a big drawdown of troops—suggesting "that U.S. forces be reduced to as few as 50,000 by the spring of 2009, down from about 150,000 now."

In other words, it's now clear: Most Americans are for a timeline, and so are most Iraqis. And even experts in the Pentagon agree.

For his part, Barack Obama is using these developments to hammer home the point that John McCain and President Bush are now isolated in their resistance to any kind of timeline for withdrawal. He wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday that reaffirmed his commitment to a timeline that would have all combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months.

It concludes, "Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea. . . [F]or far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender. It's not going to work this time. It's time to end this war."

They added a thing Obama said today:

George Bush and John McCain don't have a strategy for success in Iraq—they have a strategy for staying in Iraq. They said we couldn't leave when violence was up, they say we can't leave when violence is down. They refuse to press the Iraqis to make tough choices, and they label any timetable to redeploy our troops "surrender," even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government—not to a terrorist enemy. Theirs is an endless focus on tactics inside Iraq, with no consideration of our strategy to face threats beyond Iraq's borders.

Americans and their crazy social taboos

I keep meaning to write about Everything That Is Clearly Wrong With This Strange Country, but not doing. I could say I don't know where to begin, but a lot of it dispirits as well as confuses me, and then I have to think of the things America does right instead of getting on the internets and typetty typetty type. (I'm only blogging now because I have some immigration paperwork due. Srsly). Things America does right include icecream, butterflies, the cost of videogames, children (though I am sure that every nation on earth has better children than the UK), mainstream gay clubs, shoes, icecream and icecream. But some things here are terrible to contemplate. I am never going to an American mainstream straight club ever again. (And I really want to write about that here, but damn, it'd be hard). I get a lump in my throat every time I remember that most Americans do not know the taste of bread. (I am going to make them some next weekend. Disaster awaits).

And sometimes I just trip over stuff that I know isn't their fault really. My belief that they urbanised wrong is clearly biased and unfair. They have a whole vocabulary for being polite, and I am not fluent in it. And their social taboos are in places I never expect them. (If I knew what my social taboos were, I couldn't possibly tell you).


I am c/ping from my own Deadjournal here:


Look. We (that is, a large and assorted group of relations) were off foraging for lunch and I ended up in a car that also contained M (driving) and two smaller people - his stepbrother (aged 16) and his half-nephew (aged 11). I was asking the elder of these about his tatts and piercings, pretending I took his replies (and him) very seriously, like you do when people are 16. Nod, smile, He then starts talking about his atheism. Nod, smile, a few supportive comments, 'it's good that you've thought about this for yourself', nod. It seems to me that the two boys have had this discussion before, and the younger is not happy with it. We reached our destination right then, and M's sister is already there, and the 11-year-old is fretting and going over to her.

So I get chastised by M and his sister for not being a responsible adult and somehow putting a stop to that conversation. I have always thought that afflicting the comfortable was part of my remit (at least when I am not being a giant wuss), but no, I am supposed to be shutting the closet door and leaning hard against it. Of course it wasn't that they disapproved - they were concerned about what their elder half-sister would say if her little boy told her of this shocking thing, that a teenage relative talked about atheism and an adult openly encouraged this. Never mind that he surely already knows his step-uncle is an atheist; responsible adults are not supposed to facilitate that kind of conversation. Never mind that neither M nor his sister are Christians themselves.

What.

This kind of thing leads to me feeling anxious.


I've tried discussing it with both of them and they seem to be making mental leaps that I am not capable of at all. (I have an unhelpful belief that one closet is much the same as any other; just a place between two high walls). M says I have it all wrong and I'm just thinking of the elder kid but his thoughts are of the younger; myself, I don't see any reason for an 11-year-old to be shielded from the fact that not all of his family are devout Catholics. Worse, I don't see why anyone would want their child to assume that no one doubted his religion. What am I not seeing?

Christmas IV [more videogame blogging] & some Christians

So in a new MMO, Age of Conan, female characters are up to 35% less effective than male ones, and this is not mentioned anywhere in the character development process. Why?

Short answer: the game designers did not intend this, it's not like they're misogynists or anything like that - they just decided that there would be attack animations and you could only select a new attack once an animation had finished. Then they allowed the misogynist animators to get obsessed with lengthy boobie shots, thus making the female characters exist to be looked at while the male characters got on with shredding things. For some mysterious reason that we couldn't possibly guess at, the designers did not seek to fix the problem until gamers started complaining.

Long answer:

Let me begin with saying “yes, we here at Funcom agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug”. We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender, and we have been working on making the necessary adjustments to correct this issue for quite some time already.

Now, in our game, we have two primary sources of damage; ‘normal’ damage, commonly referred to as “white damage”, and ‘combo’ damage. Making the white damage equal for both Male and Female characters is, in this context, a fairly simple task and something we’ve already done and which should already have been patched out to Live.

For future reference, when I say that it was a fairly simple task to fix it, we’re still talking about modifying, either through actually having an animator work on the animation resource itself or by having a BCC designer adjust the speed-scaling of said animation resource, of more than 150 unique animations. In addition, these animations are fairly “simple”; by which I mean that they are your ordinary attacks and don’t contain any flourishes, sequential blows or other “complicated” stuff.

However, if we move onto ‘combo’ damage, which is what is causing the notable part of this issue, there are suddenly several factors that come into play when determining the final damage. I won’t be wasting too much time in this update to go into detail about every factor, but to quickly list a few they would be stat/modifier/multiplier (which in turn depends on class, level and weapon equipped), length of animation and, although irrelevant to this exact issue any longer, amount of steps in a combo sequence.

The main reason for the discrepancy in damage output that you’re seeing is that the length of an animation isn’t equal for both Male and Female characters in many cases. This is what we’re currently fixing, but there’s roughly 800 to 1000 animations in total that are involved here, and that they are significantly more “complex” than the ‘white damage’ animations mentioned above this naturally takes a lot more time.

Short version of long answer: boobies. FFS.

h/t Dee.


One thought I didn't add to my last gaming post - I'm playing a female PC in the NWN2 xpac, and (because of plotty plot things) this causes the Red Woman, and later Safiya, to allude to Delicious Genderqueer Subtext With Lesbian Overtones. (Um, I guess you can only fathom this bit of my rant if you've played the game, sry).

My first thought: there is no way, from the moment they'd thought up the game's background, that Akachi was going to be anything other than male, or the Red Woman anything other than female. It's only the female PC, if you have one, who is framed as perhaps being genderqueer. I cannot believe that a game plot would ever make a nod to a story's queer subtext if you chose to take a male PC, while not possessing this subtext if you choose a female PC. I think the same root sexism - the fear of women - explains why Akachi (male) in the xpac is framed as having far more to do with you than Gith (female) in the base game is.

(That's when they even refer to Gith as being female, which is about twice ever in all three of the videogames I've played that allude to her. Gith is an icon, and her various legacies have remained among the brightest plotspots in the AD&D canon since her invention in 1981; none of the 3ed manuals mention that she is female, and I had no idea myself til I played NWN2 earlier this year. Floored me, that.)


What both these things reveal is something I've known for a long time; videogames are far more conservative than reality. They're also far more conservative than any other form of storytelling. I wonder if conservatism is perhaps proportionate to the cost of entry into a medium; games are huge projects with slim profit margins at best, and each one has the power to destroy a studio. That means that, you know, the basic variety and tolerance you find out in the real world has to be nixed.


Now, Christians! Anglican ones. Who have decided that yes there will be women bishops, and no they won't be mollycoddling anyone who thinks this is a bad idea. For, mm, a reason I can't possibly fathom, not all Christians are happy about this. Libellum, LJ, qwp:

What I'm currently furious about is a quote further down the article from the Bishop of Fulham, the Right Reverend John Broadhurst, saying that the decision will cause a schism in the church because "I think a lot of us have made it quite clear if there isn't proper provision for us to live in dignity, inevitably we're driven out. It's not a case of walking away."

So allowing women equality makes it impossible for men to "live in dignity"? This is the problem. This. Right here.

For shame, Right Reverend John Broadhurst, you possessive, petty, overprivileged misogynist waste of space. As I understand it, Christ taught that all you need to live in dignity is humility and love. People like you make me glad I left the Anglican communion. A decision, by the way, which I am happy to accept personal responsibility for, unlike your craven whinging about being "driven out" as if you had no will or voice of your own. You have more status and power than most people in this country. You have no damn idea what it's like to not be able to live in dignity. Being driven out, not living in dignity - that's what happens to refugees. What you're having is a tantrum, and I'm disappointed in the BBC for bothering to print it.

And that's not all! Combatqueer brings more:

I know, I know, it seems impossible, but somehow the Vatican has become upset over something that isn't any of its business. [...]

As my Congregationalist grandma once told me, a church fight is like a divorce between five hundred people. Ugly.

Combatqueer is also wondering why the Vatican's opinion is newsworthy. Go read!

Christmas The Third

[For your recollection, the first two NWN/gender posts are at Always Christmas And and Still Always Christmas.]

It was doing so well up til then.

I've been loving the hell out of the NWN2 xpac. Like Hordes Of The Underdark was to the original Neverwinter Nights, I think it's the project the writers were working on while the tech team wrote the script for the base game. Somehow this one ended up with everything the base game lacked - good writing, genuine plot that twists when you prod it (virtually all quests have multiple endings, and these often affect later events), voice actors that you don't want to see taken out and shot, and some vestiges of originality, albeit within the cliché-eating-cliché that is Forgotten Realms.

And there's far more female visibility. I guess this is a product of the better writing, rather than a cause. The story happens to be set in one of Faerun's canonical matriarchies; aside from that, there's a lot more women around to talk to and get help and advice from. There are even, saints preserve us, women who organise with other women for purposes all their own.

In other words, it was doing pretty well up until we got to what Okku said to Kazimika Vadoi. Kazimika is one of the aforementioned matriarchs, though not their leader, and she didn't like us, for quite sensible reasons. This is what Okku [who is a beary spirit of bears and bearness] did to bring her into line:

I remember the prayers of the dockside girl, before she donned her mask. I remember how she begged the spirits to make her pretty, so that the sailors might whistle at her...might even pay for her company...

This is where I stop playing the game and and start throwing things at the wall behind my desk. Hello, it's the sex work trope again, and this time it's being explicitly used to disempower a previously significant female character, and to shame her, and to silence her objections towards you, no matter that it has nothing the fuck to do with those objections. Congrats, Kazimika, you're up there with Molly Millions and Catwoman in the hall of Awesomely Powerful Female SF Characters Whose History Of Sex Work Is Used Against Them By The Author Who Made That History Up In The First Place.

This is why male SF writers need to stop writing about sex work, unless, you know, they've done it themselves. Because male writers are going to keep building women up then using their own fantasies about sex work to knock them down again. In their hands, the trope is invariably hammer-shaped, and women look like nails.

[I just made an FMT tag, so's not to lose track. For fairness, see the two longest threads on this I've seen elsewhere, in which many people disagree with me; the recent FSF one and the older Alas one.]

few things: urbanisation, politics linkies, and Metal Gear.

Allison at Economic Woman is writing about this neato site called Walkscore. You give it your address, it checks its maps and it gives your local area points for how much cool stuff there is within walking distance. Both of the last two areas of the UK I lived in score in the 60s. My Georgia neighbourhood rates a 15, which is not the worst I've put up with; the Pennine hole I used to inhabit gets a 9, and some of that is new since I was there.

Lessons: a) the more the merrier, b) it's interesting what they can't see - pavements and lack thereof, steep hills, snakes, the presence of other people, and c) that site totally needs to have sex with mapmyrun.com and make internet babies.

Allison quotes someone citing Friedman on how sprawl, while always harmful to everyone, is particularly hard on women because they're more likely to get trapped at home. She could've gone to the SCUM Manifesto, which she didn't, but I did. We must forgive Solanas her typos and her 60s social map and her blessed batshit:

Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community: Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. Desperately insecure, fearing his woman will leave him if she is exposed to other men or to anything remotely resembling life, the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs, a collection of self-absorbed couples and their kids. Isolation enables him to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual nu becoming a 'rugged individualist', a loner, equating non-cooperation and solitariness with individuality.

There is yet another reason for the male to isolate himself: every man is an island. Trapped inside himself, emotionally isolated, unable to relate, the male has a horror of civilization, people, cities, situations requiring an ability to understand and relate to people. So like a scared rabbit, he scurries off, dragging Daddy's little asshole with him to the wilderness, suburbs, or, in the case of the hippy -- he's way out, Man! -- all the way out to the cow pasture where he can fuck and breed undisturbed and mess around with his beads and flute.

Suburbia is something Americans seem to think is universal, and non-Americans seem unable to even imagine. I was. The car is the biggest difference; American urbanisation assumes that the basic unit of humanity is the car, and European urbanisation assumes that people walk on two feet, and like to resort to cars as little as possible. I don't yet know how to drive a car. Anxious.


I often don't like Cath Elliot's CiF posts. But this one is awesome. It's about some wank I almost missed hearing about - an MP who used her Commons expenses allowance to pay for her children's nanny.

If Tory chairperson Caroline Spelman's defenders are to be believed, it's perfectly reasonable to use taxpayers' money to pay for a nanny. "Of course she should have been allowed to do it," they cried when it was revealed last weekend that she'd paid for her nanny out of the public purse: "She was a busy woman with an important job." Well in that case, what about the rest of us? If an MP can have a state-funded nanny, when can I expect to find Mary Poppins standing on my doorstep, carpet bag in hand?

[...]

Note how there's been no mention of her husband's role in any of this, and no questions asked about how much involvement he had in the children's early years. The assumption being made on all sides is that male MPs have wives to look after the kids so they don't need childcare allowances, whereas women MPs are stuck with husbands, so of course they should get extra help. And yet David Cameron has small children, as does Gordon Brown, so why haven't the same voices been calling out for a childcare allowance to help these men juggle work and family life? Who's been looking after their children when they've been going about their important business?

Brad Hicks has done some good stuff lately, especially this about the Clinton campaign debt:

What could possibly justify asking guys like me who make less than $20,000 per year, living on fixed income in a Section 8 housing complex, to donate money so that a multi-millionairess doesn't have to get by on "only" her last five million dollars? Please, somebody, for the love of all that's holy and good, explain this to me?

Consensus from comments there; rich folks should not suffer for their miscalculations and errors of judgement, because they are rich folks, but poor folks deserve to land on their asses every time they misstep.


You've probably seen this already, but: MichelleObamaWatch. Lately the feed of fluff-news pieces about Ms O seems more positive than not, but when there is shit you can read it there first. And often it is shit beyond belief.


Tycho on game reviewing in general, and MGS4 (OMG) in particular:

Even if you could measure games with numbers, a point I do not concede, there's no universal Goddamned basis for comparison - there is no "unit" of measurement. We measure things so we can compare them to other things. The trouble is that everyone is performing a kind of mental arithmetic, cramming their own internal symbologies into this or that frame and stripping out wisdom in the process. Editorial voice is a fallacy. They're all conversions of interpretations of moments. And we lose crucial data at every step.

Tycho usually has impeccable taste, but he is not fond of Metal Gear. My feeling is that Metal Gear is one of those fandoms that can only be enjoyed if you take liberties with it, and grant it liberties in return. It's flawed, it jumps the shark towards the end of each game, it disappears up its own ass every so often, it is cryptic, and it occasionally warrants a cringe. It is also brain-eatingly brilliant and so packed with inspirations that it's spawned an equally diverse pack of rabid fans, of which I am one. But I grant liberties to canon, when a good canon needs it, and not everyone likes to do that, you know?


Five other current things about Metal Gear:

a) My favourite webcomic, the mighty MGS fanwerk Last Days Of Foxhound, just wound up after 500 strips. Much hilarity - and uncanny insights - for any MG fan. [Also spoilers for MGS1, MGS3 and Portable Ops].

Its most famous page is from four years ago: One Mantis, One Vote, in which Psycho Mantis took a step out of the comic to give a big queer political shoutout. (I saw that on scans_daily sometime afterwards, and fell in love from there. Although that page is offcanon unless you assume MGS1 took place in November or December - I thought it was the spring of 2004). My favourite page is Ocelost, the snapshot from inside Revolver Ocelot's mind. Hostage Negotiation is win for anyone who's played MGS, and double triple badass win for anyone who's played MGS3.

b) Some assclown has decided to make a bloody film out of this franchise.

c) ...and the folk on IMDB have pegged David Hayter as the scriptwriter. I am not at all sure that this is true, only that if it is not true, the foundations of the world will splinter and sink.

d) Either way, the film idea has a significant capacity for epic fail.

e) and I'll probably not get to play MGS4 til Christmas anyway. Stupid console wars.