The Ramblings of an (Crappy) Artist...

Less than a month ago I was talking about 2014 being a roller coaster ride. 2014 isn’t over, and I’ve determined it’s not a roller coaster ride. It’s Hollywood’s Tower of Terror. Up and down. Up and down. Uuuupp. DOWN! It hasn’t stopped. And not just days after the death of Robin Williams, did another thing have to rear its ugly head: gamer drama.

Part of me wants to avoid mentioning HER name at all costs, and the other part of me wants to just stand up and say, “No, fuck you, I can talk about this if I want.” But in the last few weeks, I actually feel like I’ve grown up a bit… so I will avoid mentioning her name… to an extent. This started over someone’s lack of morals. This started over a jilted ex-lover deciding to make things worse by spreading drama around. This started over petty bullshit. 

But it was a spark that erupted an ever burning flame.

This woman’s inability to be faithful, and this man’s inability to keep private matters private, started chaos in the gaming community that has not died down despite it being almost a full month of this drama. Drama revolving around gaming journalists and their inability to handle criticism and conflict. Drama that has revealed a gross corruption that many thought, including myself, was exclusive only to “real life” news. 

I was a fool. I was ignorant. I should have known better.

For years, I had been following and becoming friends with people that were very feminist, and very social justice. To me, there was nothing wrong with anything they were saying. I felt there was a grave injustice to women in the gaming world. Some tweeted vile things that, at the time, I laughed at. I laughed at the people they tried to make fun of. I laughed at the people they called “fedora hats.” 

I was becoming the same type of person that made fun of me for my entire school life…

A bully.

Before this GamerGate stuff happened, I was starting to become conflicted with myself. Yes, there are very obvious problems in gaming involving women and minorities… but I started to make a lot of friends that were developers in the gaming world… and they weren’t like the people my social justice friends were making them out to be. They were men… they were women. They were people. Real people.

So when GamerGate started happening, near the beginning, I was conflicted even more. This woman did something terrible… and it revealed a lot of problems in the gaming journalism scene. I was angry. I felt betrayed. I felt like now women would never be taken seriously. That the only way for a woman to progress in the gaming industry was to sleep with journalists and developers for favors. Was this truly how people will see women now?

I felt she brought it upon herself.

And that very thought brought my world crashing down on me.

Suddenly, to my social justice friends, I became an enemy. “You need to back off,” one said. When I tried to push the conversation, when I tried to get answers from another side, he only replied, “What part of ‘back off’ do you not understand?”

It hurt. More than anything, it hurt. This one person in particular I had gone out of my way to help them after they lost their job for their own opinion. For a brief moment, I wanted to cry… and then I became enraged. This…”friend”… speaking to me like I was the same kind of person they constantly spoke down on. 

And I realized something: They were never a friend.

Friends do not tell you to shut up. Friends do not threaten you or stand over you. 

I didn’t back off. I was mad. I wanted answers, and I wasn’t getting them from the people I thought I could trust over someone else. I didn’t care about this woman. I cared about what this woman revealed. I wanted to know why. Why were people being censored? Banned? This whole thing was exploding and my “friends” were turning on me for wanting to know why. 

The only people that were willing to provide answers was the “bad guys.” And because this one side considered the other side “bad people” then anything they ever said didn’t matter. At all. They were insulted. They were ignored. They were accused of being trolls. They were accused of vile things simply because they disagreed with another side. My whole world was being thrown around like a pair of shoes in a dryer. 

But I wanted to know what was going on. More people started talking about a deeper corruption in the gaming journalism scene… then corruption in the actual indie game scene… 

THEN SUDDENLY…!

GAMERS ARE DEAD! THE GAMING SCENE IS OVER! GAMERS ARE SCUM! AWFUL! #DESCRIBEAGAMERIN4WORDS! GAMERS ARE SHIIIIIIIT!

Woah, what?

Gamers are evil? Kotaku, Polygon, and dozens more sites suddenly talking about how bad a gamer is? What was going on?  These sites are supposed to be FOR gamers! When did turning on your audience become something that wasn’t basically shooting yourself in the goddamn foot?

All that was going on in my head was, “WHAT IS GOING ON!?”

… and when I try to share what I thought was information, more and more people began to belittle me. They attacked me for “falling into the troll trap” more or less. They accused me of sharing information that they compared to be similar to the anti-vacc, conspiracy theorist kind of information. 

These people that I have been friends with, people I had been following for over five years, thought so little of me that they thought I would be easily brainwashed by people I didn’t know. That I wouldn’t research anything on my own. That I took people’s words for as they are instead of thinking for myself.

…and they were right… 

I was doing that… 

…with them. 

I let my social justice friends make me think that the gaming industry was against me. I let them make me think that I was no body. I let them make me think that, as a woman, I wouldn’t go anywhere. 

I let them make me think the world was against me.

My “friends” didn’t respect me. They never did. I was nothing to them… 

I was a fool.

The last few weeks have been an eye opener for me. I’ve sat alone in my room and thought about the last few years. Thought about these people I considered friends saying the most vile, mean shit to people they didn’t know online. They would go out of their way to find people that they knew would disagree with them and start fights with people.

They started fights with people they didn’t know over twitter. 

GODDAMN, I was stupid. I’m almost thirty years old, and I let myself fall back into the same shit that my sister and dozens of little kids do over Facebook. Total strangers, people I never knew. Why? 

I never wanted to start fights with people. I didn’t want to be mean. I felt uncomfortable so many times these last few years as I watched my “friends” name call strangers over hashtags. Armchair activists. Fourth wave feminists… 

GamerGate and NotYourShield matter to me… because I know now… The Industry isn’t against me. It never was. There are very, very clear issues with women and minorities in gaming, but it’s not a huge pile of shit that I was lead to believe. 

I’m sorry to the people I made fun of. I’m sorry to the people I argued with over Twitter about women in the gaming industry.

I want to make something very clear: I’m still a feminist. There are still social injustice in this world… but there are other ways to work with this that doesn’t involve getting on a social network platform and name calling.

I end this with a quote that was very recently tweeted by an artist I follow:

“A life filled with silly social drama and gossip indicates that a person is disconnected from purpose and lacking meaningful goals. People on a path of purpose don’t have time for drama.” - Brendon Burchard

I have not lived by this quote, and it’s time that I do. It’s time I give myself a new purpose. I need to focus on art. I need to focus on the positive aspects of my life. 

Stop making it so fucking easy for Trump to win 2020, you idiots. You’re NOT HELPING.

Every time you decide to go, “punch Nazis,” and end up hitting some mixed-race kid with cancer, every time you decide Jewish holocaust survivors are EXACTLY THE SAME as Nazis for support of Israel, every time you try to fight “white supremacy” by attacking Asians wearing fucking HATS, you make it easier for plutocrats and assholes to win without doing anything at all. You OVERSHADOW their ineffectuality as candidates, you make people that would otherwise want progressive things slide center-right just to counterbalance your obscene ideological shit, if only to put the brakes on the out of control nutcase crap you’re doing, socially.

And it could all be done in a single year if you’d stop trying to forcibly slide more extreme. Or, “more left,” as you claim. You’re trading long term entrenchment for Charles Manson-esque sense of community. Even moderate conservatives don’t even have to pander to the mainstream to get them, because sensible practical people are terrified of you and what you’d do if elected.

Wreck-It Ralph: Ralph Breaks the Internet, post credit scene. No spoilers.

…the huge guy who’s carrying the real contestant

I know I am in good company when after more than 12 hours straight of crafting to finish our costumes, we start our shoot at 2AM and we’re still filled with so much energy and laughter. Love my space fam! 

Voltron: Legendary Defender Keith ❤️ (me) @jin.behindinfinity Pidge 💚 @dinnygrayson Hunk 💛 @makeithappenac Lance 💙 @gaxobliterata Shiro 🖤 @merkymerx Costumes crafted freehand by us Painted by @thebigpaophoto Special thanks to @happyhario @bigbadlonewolf @gelograyson for the support!

my brain: you have to draw to get better though

me: