Beyonce And Her Pseudo-Feminist Lies

Excellent video about how Beyonce’s latest femme-anthem (antfemme?) might be hindering more than it’s helping.

A Poor Gamer’s Plight

I promised myself when I started this blog that it wasn’t going to feature too much throwaway material, hence the quite sporadic updates. A keen blogger, I wanted the content on DTB! to be sort of universally appealing instead of just me musing incoherently as most of my previous blogs have been. Writing this entry makes my skin itch a little for these reasons, as it is probably much more written “for” me than for anybody else. I apologise in advance.

The sad fact is that I am very poor right now. I could give you a number to describe my current monetary situation and it would only feature two digits. As it is it doesn’t look like this is going to change any time soon either so I trawl forward on other people’s charity and my own tears for rudimentary sustenance. One would think that this state of sedentary poverty would be golden for my gaming and writing interests, but that would be a faulty assumption.

Due to my personal budget collapse I have been forced to a solitary gaming existence where AAA-titles zoom by in the world outside and me unable to grab any for myself. I have not played Portal 2, LA Noire or even any of the Assassin’s Creed games. I managed to get my hands on the original Mass Effect which was on sale for less than a tenner due to the broken plastic box, but that is about as connected I have been to the mainstream release schedule. When I was working and had the funds I ironically found myself sans any free time to indulge in any gaming. Working 12 hours per day will take it out of the best of them and since I spent all that time playing games at work I was less than in the mood to do the same on my few hours of freedom.

So I fled. I fled into the world of cheap indie-games. I fled to my iPod and my XBLA where I have been nesting for the well over a year by this point. I have played Limbo, Braid, Sword & Sworcery EP, Angry Birds, The Nightjar, Canabalt, Archon, Infinity Blade and Plants Vs. Zombies for hours on end and been thoroughly enjoying myself. As the rest of the world is busy swooning over the facial animations in LA Noire I’m far too invested in the adventures of The Scythian and Dogfella to notice the hubbub. I am in a vacuum. An iVacuum.

I love games and I keep up with the industry to the best of my abilities, but right now I’m on the fringe, which I count as both a blessing and a curse. One day I will (hopefully) be back at some sort of normal schedule with a relatively steady stream of income to boot at which point I will pick up where I left off, but until then I’m having way too much fun with my iPod to really care.

And yes, I will review Sword & Sworcery.

It’s Jedwednesday! 18/05

Here’s a new recurring segment I am going to call Jedwednesdays where I present the past weeks best tweets from the best band in history; Jedward. For those unfortunate enough to have missed their Twitter feed, it is a glorious amalgamation of dadaistic poetry and childlike exuberance. So for the first time ever, let’s dissect the past week through the eyes of Jedward.

“we just want to let you know that you guys are the best ever and we love you all so much”

Aww, isn’t that a nice start? We love you too, guys.

“whats up people! you know who we are talking about whats up people! can we get an encore! whats up people dont pee yo people?”

I admire the energy here, which seems to be these guys’ standard setting. I’m surprised they can even get to sleep at night without running in place like a pair of dreaming dogs. And what’s up? Since we took your advice to not pee, the answer is urinary tract infection.

“Jumping! Jumping like a Polaroid Picture Hey YA! http://twitpic.com/4wkkmc“

There’s a lot of jumping in these boys’ weird lives, but this one caught my eyes since I’m not entirely sure they know what a polaroid picture is.

“whos going to the gym? we are not we have never been in a gym without an awkward person trying to compete with us! last time it was a lady”

See, that’s exactly why I don’t go to the gym either. Those damn ladies and their primal competitive instincts.

“Teddy Bears! some people hug them and others give them as gifts we don’t do any of that we have teddy bear trainers on now!”

That’s a pretty impressive plot twist for a 140 character tweet. I thought I knew all there was to know about teddy bears until they hit me with that sneakers bomb. Where can I get some?

“EMERGENCY WE FOUND A HOSPITAL BED AND WE JUST HAD TO CHECK IT OUT! http://twitpic.com/4x6isf“

Exhibit A for why there needs to be a Jedward photo book made by Taschen right away.

“Louis Walsh says hello to everyone he has a very cool dicky bow!”

I stopped reading this tweet five characters from the end because it made too much sense.

“We are never late the Movie is simply early! So weird when you miss the beginning of a movie! It’s like who’s that! What’s happening?”

Seinfeld couldn’t have done it better.

“We have a burning desire to burn some toast! It’s like no don’t burn bread!”

Jedward is all about the duality between one’s primal desires and external stigmas. And toast.

“Feeding a Baby some baby food! silly baby! but the person is not a baby! silly baby person!”

Say this quickly and it starts to sound like Lady Gaga lyrics.

“Ring Ring! Alarm Alarm! Wake Up! did you have a good sleep! what did you dream of! who did you dream of? did someone go baby wee wee”

Again with the Urine Policing.

“Seeing Skinny jeans for the first time! always wearing skinny jeans but never said hello just went into a shop and bought them hows yo jeans”

I don’t even

“its not that we are crazy everyone needs to wake up! have a bowel of energy and top it with some jumps and flips!”

I’m embroidering this on a pillow right now.

“There is a weird smell around us but we smelt ourselves and is deffo the people infront of us! Get the new fragrance it’s called ‘I smell’”

Not everyone can hold it in forever, guys.

“Just had a race to the aeroplane toilet against this dude guess who won? Jedward! didn’t just walk! jumped over the seats”

As you have evidently found out for yourselves.

“Really want to go to the dessert! It’s kinda like a huge sand castle that fell apart and left a dessert”

And in the “dessert” we’ll leave our heroes until next week. Stay tuned for more Jedwednesdays!

Gearbox And The Gay Robot Trick

Let us first take a look at this classic DTB-excerpt from last April 22nd:

now I hope to return to some kind of semi-regular updating schedule

Yeah, I got your hopes up and I crushed them. Sorry about that. My empty promises aside, let’s blog again. Here we go!

The big hubbub during the last 24 hours has surrounded the cutT gay character in the constantly-upcoming Duke Nukem Forever. According to Gearbox there were plans to include a sidekick for the Duke whose sexual preference was to be slightly at odds with Nukem’s own. The story’s been covered everywhere since Randy Pitchford made the non-announcement and everybody’s having opinions about this non-existent character that won’t show up in a game. Whether it would have been a disaster (it almost certainly would have been) or not is sort of irrelevant now though – the character wasn’t taken out of the game during the late beta-stage or anything, but only ever existed briefly as a possible inclusion and never made it past the ideas stage. For a game that’s been in development as long as Duke Forever, I would have been surprised if “gay robot sidekick”* wasn’t brought to the table at least once.

It’s therefore odd that Gearbox has even taken the time to bring the whole thing up in the first place. PR seems to be the easy answer; get people talking about something you almost discussed having in your (probably) terrible game is a good, easy strategy to get the internet buzzing with… I dunno, excitement? Gearbox played the “gay” card because that still holds quite a lot of power in today’s gaming industry. Holy crap, a GAY character? What, in, like, a real game? The thought! Gasps everywhere, for a plethora or reasons; would it have been homophobic? Empowering? Funny? Icky? How would it have turned out if it had happened?

I don’t know. And I see no reason to care. This is a non-story entirely brought about because Gearbox are buying time since people are – again – losing interest in their vaporware. The Gay Robot story is pure PR disguised as something else and far too few gaming news outlets have called them on this. Everybody is asking “why was this cut?” when they should ask “why are you telling us this? Characters, maps, music, story elements and concepts get cut in games all the time up until release day, so why do you expect us to think it’s interesting just because this one particular item had the word ‘gay’ attached to it in mile-high neon letters? We’re forward-thinking, progressive and the word ‘gay’ does not frighten or excite us so stop your petty marketing crap on us, Mr Pitchford. Go finish your fucking game instead.”

*I used to play bass for “Gay Robot Sidekick”