LINK:
“The Unearthing” by Leigh Alexander (May 30th, 2014)
http://leighalexander.net/the-unearthing
Truthfully, most of the readers here ought to have already read this piece by this point. Published on Friday, Leigh Alexander’s authentically Gonzo piece about the ET unearthing is a great followup to the Weekend Linkbait. Over the course of the weekend I saw numerous people call out Leigh’s piece as being awesome, which should really be just assumed because her stuff has been awesome for quite a long, long time now.
This was going to be a longer comment about this post, but as I began to unpack my thoughts I realized that there was a really good editorial here…so I am just going to save it for Friday. Until then, READ THE ARTICLE! Good stuff.
“Well, there are a lot of ways to be grown-up besides just making shit up about drinking and sex.”
The self-awareness oozing from that statement, it is so tasty.
1.) I don’t think it’s a medium where culture goes to die. I don’t think she does either. I think we all know this. Now that we’ve got that cleared away–
2.) Ahahahaha, the bar. The guys. The fucking culture. I wish she’d write about it as it is abroad. My perennial wet dream is those slickfuck whiteboy game journalists in Japan with their candied girlfriends dangling from each arm just getting skewered, royally, painfully, in satirical prose by someone famous enough to do them serious harm. I wish Leigh had come with me to the Tokyo Game Show drinking thing Kotaku threw. I wish I’d known her. Crecente and Bashcraft sitting in the fern-crusted entry cave–the whole damn place was grotto-themed, random fake rocks and crap on the walls–taking the slavering obeisance of each new person entering like demigods, them never lacking for drinks, no never, though the rest of us had to fight tooth and claw through the mob to get a seat let alone a drink. (Most of the rest of us, anyway. I attended with a fellow k-tite, a businessman who, as a male in Japan hailing from Mexico, was treated as shittily as my foreign non-hostess ass, and who would not put up with any of the usual bullshit about people just not seeing you or being afraid to deal with you. He strong-armed six bloody maries out of the waitress for me; god knows how many he knocked back. He told me about his wife and his baby daughter who’d been born just before he left and whom he missed. We commiserated on how no one wanted to be our friends.)
The skewering would obviously have to be done by a male of course. For the same reason it wouldn’t ultimately have changed the public discourse if Leigh Alexander had attended and had commented on the ridiculous fetishized worship that follows in the wake of people like Tim Rodgers or Bashcraft like a miasma. For all the reasons she doesn’t dwell on; these maladjusted shits turning their profession into a treehouse with a No Gurlz Allowed sign nailed to the lowest branch; the shamefaced dickery masquerading as Don Juan with a DS, the spewing of pithy phrases ganked from some public domain document as though it were deep knowledge one actually went through the mental effort to obtain, to process, to nurture in one’s life and act upon…for all these reasons, plus the usual The Are No Girls On the Internet shit, no one would care if Leigh Alexander had eviscerated those who deserved, and continue to deserve, eviscerating. Those who taint what should be a profession–_something to which you are devoted_– loving and hating critiquing and following and _helping to create_ an art form, a voice, of a culture and a moment and every culture and moment, in some way, since Tennis For Two (and hell, I know you are expanding your scope to tabletop gaming–since forever, then!).
Maybe your longer comment will be about gender, maybe about being, as you grow older, a little more defensive of the things you love most (for better or worse, I know I am). But as long as games mean money, they mean, will mean, to some–to some of the biggest writers and developers out there–writing and developing to the lowest common denominator. Which often means guys who only let you get a word in if they think it’ll make you let them fuck you after the conference, or the seminar, or the press junket, or the class, and who do not give two shits that games were one of the first and last gifts your mother was capable of giving you, marking you out leagues ahead of your computer-illiterate classmates in grade school, and appearing in your mailbox, unwrapped, accompanied by confusingly loving notes on index cards, as some of the last things she was able to make it to the post office to send before the Alzheimer’s carried her too far away. Your childhood, your love of and critique of and desire to see more of yourself in and to see better versions of yourself in this medium of gaming, which isn’t and never was theirs, never completely, matters not one fig to Those Guys. You’re a B cup who should’ve known better than not to starve herself and get implants and stilettos before showing up to a gaming event with Those Guys because dammit, you can only fit so many booth babes in the venue and why crowd it with these ugly bitches who think they can write about games, amirite?
Fuck those guys.
@Metaphlame – See, I feel kind of bad because I really cannot come up with an adequate response to your comment except to raise my fist and respond “Yeah, totally! Fuck those guys!”
I can’t tell what I feel more pressured to put out a good article by- the high quality of this comment or the board of overlords.
I’ve been absent for a while, but now I remember why I used to love this website. Thanks, I’ll try and check back more frequently. How frequently you update your site? dfedcdadbbee
@Johna86
Thank you for the kind words! We update our site more or less regularly once a week- with Seth adhering to a strict schedule and myself, well, a little less so.
You can also check us out on the podcast run by k8monster of the Feminism/Geekery blog. The podcast also doesn’t have a set schedule of sorts, but I’d encourage you to look it up (and the Feminism/Geekery blog) if you enjoy the stuff you find here.