#internet commenters

Are you ready for this 500 Days of Kristin commenter? (And she’s a Jezebel commenter!)

ImTiredThatIsAll graces us with her lovely effervescence this holiday season. Who is she? What’s her criticisms and praise of Jezebel? How would she define feminism? Why does she enjoy commenting online but more importantly, why does she enjoy Allie Jones’ 500 Days of Kristin posts?!! 

As always you can find this episode on iTunes, FeedBurner/RSS, Stitcher, or by clicking here and doing the whole right click > “Save As…” deal.

Gawker Commenters, it’s the Holiday season and I’m looking for a group of Gawker/Jezebel commenters to join in some online Xmas caroling and be featured on solo tracks for The Undressing Underground’s first Christmas Album. You don’t need to be an amazing singer (can you at least sing in key?!!), you just have to enjoy singing.Here are some of the songs I’ve compiled for this 2015 Holiday season:

O Come all ye Faithful

I’ll be home this Christmas ( solo )

The First Noel

Blue Christmas ( solo )

Silent Night

O Holy Night ( solo?)

Last Christmas-Wham ( maybe )

Please come home for Christmas

Hark the herald angels sing

We 3 Kings

Mele kalikimaka

Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas ( solo )

Silver Bells

A Gawker Commenter Xmas album is peak KittensAndUnicorns. If you’d like to join in the merriment, email me at [email protected]. Singing is fun.

Submit your guest suggestions, short stories, songs, and poems! Just leave them in the comments or send us an email at rob AT undressingunderground DOT com or kandu AT undressingunderground DOT com.

Speaking of guest suggestions, feel free to submit yourself! If you’re doing an interesting thing or are part of an interesting culture, we’d like to hear from you.

You can also leave me a voicemail about whatever at 260-PUNK POD. We’ll play it at the end of the next episode.

And hey, you can now follow us on Twitter! Kittens and I are on there individually, but now Blerg is running an official Undressing Underground twitter handle.

AND!!!!!!! If you wanna support the podcast, you can donate some money to our Patreon or Paypal, or just leave us a review on iTunes–any star rating will do.

There are a number of articles that bring out the ire of internet commenters. It would be hard to write an exhaustive list.

Any thing to do with feminism is one particular target. It’s all about ethics in … something.

Driving is another good one. Everyone else on the road is a bad driver, except the person writing the comment, obviously. And don’t even get them started on cyclists.

There are countless other topics that will cause people to express many, many strongly held opinions.

One example of strongly held opinions seems to be electric cars. Recently, the New Zealand government announced that the contract to supply cars used to transport MPs and ministers would again be given to BMW.

The Green Party put out a press release saying that the government should have considered the use of the Tesla Model S for this tender process. There are a number of problems with considering the Tesla for supply in New Zealand, primarily that Tesla isn’t even officially sold in the country.

Despite these very real challenges with the practicalities, I personally think the press release from the Green Party had some merit. The government should be leading the way in adopting green technology, even at some additional cost as long as that cost is minor and justifiable.

We’re probably not ready for Tesla to transport MPs just yet but maybe in the near future.

I read through the article and agreed with many of the points, and then I got to reading the comments.

It seems as if the commenters are questioning the sanity of anyone who would even consider an electric vehicle as a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine. Anyone who voiced an opinion in support of the electric car was voted down for being a crazy leftie green.

The most frequently raised issue, obviously, was the range of the batteries. A Tesla Model S will apparently travel about 400 km (250 miles) on a fully charged battery. This may be a problem for a number of users of the vehicles but you would think that the range was 40 km rather than 400 after reading the comments.

It’s unclear what the usage patterns for these cars would be and whether it is practical to live with a 400 km range in all circumstances for transporting MPs. It’s possible that it’s not. Considering the widespread use of hybrid cars by taxi drivers, there is obviously some merit in exploring other options.

When I think about my car usage, which I accept is wholly different from a government limousine, most days I would drive less than 100 km, occasionally going as far as 200 km. Sometimes I will leave town on a longer trip but that might be a couple of times a year as anything further than that will be by plane.

this is a comment someone wrote in response to this recent article about gamers vs. Art and Tale of Tales closing its doors. I found it quite amusing, and would like to present to you: 

A Passive-Aggressive Internet Commenter, Translated

“Actually, I believe my straight white maleness affords me some clarity and nuance to this issue that you may have missed in your article. (I mean, obviously you have missed it. I'm just trying to pretend to be nice).

1. Some people have an idea that videogames should only be one particular thing. Obviously you are not aware of this. When things differ from the norm, it makes some people uncomfortable. You must not be aware of this. I am very upset when you imply that a shitty Twine game is built upon the same building blocks as Skyrim, because that makes me feel weird about myself. It's one thing to say that an escapist world with shiny weapons and flying dragons that makes me feel good about myself is a game, it's another to say something with stories from the real world that make me feel bad is.

2. I think somebody once said that shorter is better, which obviously means this principle that I am abstractly invoking out of context is universally better. Especially because some people don't like things that are long.

3. Another part is when people have an attitude that places themselves up against other attitudes. This is wrong. When people are passionate about something, they ruin everything. EVERYTHING! Both sides are clearly wrong!!

Have you also considered my new take on non straight white male characters? Obviously you have not, I'm just being nice again. Once again, my straight white maleness affords me much more nuance to this issue. So let me spell this out for you as well:

1. There's a difference between calling any sort of attention to yourself, which is bad, and making me vaguely aware that you exist as a non straight white male in some kind of nonexistent postracial/postsexist/etc fantasy universe somewhere far in the background, which is probably okay. The first is obviously bad, because it makes me uncomfortable by calling attention to real world cultural issues that upset and/or implicate me and that I use videogames to escape from dealing with. The second is fine because you don't implicate my straight white maleness in any way with any of your feelings or background stories, nor do you acknowledge that they exist in any way (thereby also potentially implicating me).

2. Other people perceive that you are pushing an agenda of inclusiveness, and that makes them feel bad. When they feel bad, they lash out. I’m not saying I do this, though I do. But I will say that when a character becomes not straight white and male anymore, they more easily become a commodity - but they are not a commodity otherwise. That is how Capitalism works, according to Marx.

Then there's the people who are very unhappy with the state of the videogame industry. Or "baddies", as I call them (flippantly, of course =P). Sometimes the "baddies" like to suggest that there's something wrong with me if I don't believe the videogame industry should change. Obviously they are wrong about this, and uppity. This is an act of aggression on their part, which they obviously need therapy for.