It’s Monday Again: Attention and Fantasies

A sketch of a woman sitting alone at a bar.

I did a lot of stuff last week so I decided to once again shamelessly steal an idea from Leigh Alexander and update you on all of the places I was doing things around the Internet.

Last week’s episode of Justice Points featured Lulu, otherwise known as BlueSweatshirt, talking about her indie witch simulator  Fantastic Witch Collective. We asked her a lot of questions about the gay witch aesthetic, as well as poked at issues of diversity, decorum in e-sports as well as Far Cry 4. It was a lot of fun.

I have had a lot of issues lately sleeping and so I’m often up very early in the morning and that is a good time to play video games without being interrupted. One such morning saw me playing Borderlands and I had a very odd experience with killing a skag. Goes to show though, how little I know about the mechanics of some of my favorite games and instead choose to barrel into fights without any outside knowledge about how it should work. Still, it was weird feeling that emotional about a fictional animal that would tear my face off.

A lot of interesting digging has been going on about The Hashtag That Shan’t Be Named lately, specifically in a sociological vein. I read A Man in Black’s Storify about their perceptions of Goobergate from the perspective of how 4Chan culture operates and felt inspired to go on a tweet rant  about the larger forces at work that inform said culture. This also lead to an interesting tangent about why I hate the phrase “attention whore,” because Goobers seem to be using terrorist tactics towards any woman who dares to be successful. You can read the Storify on all of this here. Thanks for WarrenIsDead for collating all of it.

Finally, my first published piece of game writing went up over at Paste Games! It is my thoughts on the intersection of how millennials have been living and why so many of us love life sims for this reason, including the newly popular Fantasy Life. I was really excited that Paste picked up my pitch and it is a subject that I consider pretty close to my heart as someone who’s had to move around and live fairly austerely; gaming has been a huge savior in my life even when I have fallen on hard times.

If you like this feature, let me know in the comments section!