Oh, look. A terrible news article about a subculture.

July 29, 2010 · Posted in Games, Rants · 1 Comment 

So the M&G did an article on ICON, the recent gaming convention up in Jo’burg. It’s about as awful as you would expect, only worse. It makes it sound as if all the women were walking around in revealing outfits with their tits falling out, and that the main attraction of the con to women is the possibility of attracting a horde of desperate nerds no matter how shy or unconventionally attractive they are. Not, you know, participation in any of the games, or the purchase of cool toys; those are for the smelly man-children running around and whacking each other with rubber swords.

Here’s where you can read this wonder of modern journalism in all its glory. Use of latex and bleach is recommended if you have a gentle and sensitive nature or are allergic to fail.

Since I appear to be kind of half maybe possibly not actually logged in to the website, and I have no idea whether it’s eaten my comment, and if it hasn’t eaten my comment it has almost certainly eaten the paragraph breaks in my comment, thus rendering it unreadable, here it is again:

This is yet another “quirky human interest” article written by a clueless mainstream journalist who briefly encounters a subculture and then regurgitates a hopelessly confused mess of whatever they found most memorable. But it’s a lot worse than average.

I came here expecting to get a bit annoyed about the conflation of LARPing with the SCA, or the portrayal of all LARPing as MEAD-style boffer LARPing. But the horrible and sensationalist gender stereotypes on display here kind of eclipse the geeky details.

I disagree that the article helps any of the hobbies it features. It tells men “these subcultures welcome sexist jerks” and tells women “stay far away from here unless you would enjoy wading through a cesspit of sexist jerks”.

I was there, I wore normal clothes (like a lot of other women there, who I guess were not exciting or exotic enough to be mentioned), I had a great geeky time and nobody was rude to me. But if all I knew about ICON came from this article, I would avoid it like the plague.

I know women who dress up at cons, sometimes in revealing outfits, satirically and non-satirically. I know a lot of the women from the T&A RPG team. I may have to agree to disagree with them about the feminist implications of dressing up in revealing outfits at cons, but that’s a whole other post — and on the whole I think they should wear whatever the hell they want and not be assumed to be wearing it for the benefit of dudely eyeballs. Our differences of opinion notwithstanding, I think it’s safe to say that the satirical element went so far over the reporter’s head it may have ended up in that giant football dirigible floating over the city.

(In non-ranty post-ICON news, I have giant blisters on my hands from screwing my giant alien’s legs in, but it was so worth it. It looks totally badass. :D )

P.S. The really annoying thing about this is that in South Africa roleplaying isn’t that male-dominated anymore. OK, maybe the nationwide roleplaying diaspora — all those tiny cells of friends who have played AD&D all by themselves since high school and never talk to other roleplayers — is male-dominated, but the larger communities centered on e.g. ICON or CLAWs at UCT are full of women and have been for over a decade. And they’re not just “girlfriends and sisters”; they write LARPs and modules and organise things and come to conventions every year. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that is seriously misrepresenting the community.

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Forever Bubble

July 22, 2010 · Posted in Games, Tech and coding · Comment 

Finished all the levels in the default Frozen Bubble levelset? Run out of custom levels from the interwebs? Random levels too boring? Making levels too hard? Sounds like you need Forever Bubble — what I made on Tuesday night instead of working.

Randomly generate pretty levels — for ever! Run it with --help to see all the options. You need the argparse and networkx python modules, and obviously python. It should work on any *NIX. The Frozen Bubble levels directory needs to exist if you want to save there. Patches, ports and comments welcome. If you generate a particularly awesome level, paste it into a comment; maybe I’ll compile a “greatest hits” levelset.

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