Oh god, somehow I’d forgotten about this. That was not cool at all.
The comic was funny. I’m not sure where the “offensive” part is.
I don’t understand how you can think both those things. Surely the “humor” of the strip was based entirely on how offensive it was.
I suppose I could try to explain why a comic whose punchline is “HA HA RAPE” is offensive, but if you can’t figure it out yourself why should I bother?
(For the record, here’s the comic. I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it.)
It’s just as offensive as it was in Stiffy Makane… the text is verbatim from the game, and the images are completely non-explicit.
Not just “HA HA RAPE” but “HA HA GAY RAPE”.
But ez did at least promise not to do it again, which is a lot more graceful than how many bloggers handle similar issues. coughpennyarcadecough
Actually, the comic came first; Thornton ganked Space Moose from a Canadian student comic by Adam Thrasher.
The relevant difference is that in The Undiscovered Country, the objectionable content cannot be seen without going through this:
Aaaaah. Ok.
Indeed! That, coupled with my new knowledge that apparently the comic wasn’t as off-topic as I thought, is why I’ve no interest in continuing to wale on that particular transgression.
See, I had no idea it was related to IF at all, since, well, I have some sensibilities and also a short attention span for longer IF, so I’d never played The Undiscovered Country. From my perspective, having the comic show up in my usually-IF-related feed was just an off-topic-seeming slap to the face.
You two are not the new punk rock. Here’s the dialog you seem to want: writing like you’re the concussed AI of a meandering garbage skiff makes you and your buddy unreadable, not people pushing the envelope. I’m all for telling a community filled with stuffed shirts how awful they are, but white-knighting the lack of capitalization isn’t the way to go about it, f. u. cummings.
I feel guilty if I tag more than one post a week for Planet-IF. I have two forums that sometimes have threads on text games, but I don’t get them listed on Planet IF, because that’s not what it is for. Go make a forum and the people who like your stuff will be there. You can even use back-end regex to ensure that nobody uses punctuation, capital letters and paragraph breaks. Remember that the littlun’s name is Percival when the adults come to rescue all of you from the island.
Furthermore, since we’re all thinking it anyway, here’s general advice to anyone in earshot: nobody wants to see posts on Planet IF that aren’t about IF, that go into spasms of inexplicable rage or posts that otherwise fail to advance the hobby or make it more fun. It is very easy to set things up so that Planet IF only shows stuff you specifically tag. It being curated by radix is a good thing, because it stops it from becoming as awful as r*if became at the end.
Is r*if gone now? (I haven’t used Usenet for quite a while now.)
No it’s still there (both arts and games groups). Not many posts, and a lot of spam posts. But still there.
Offensive to whom? I was never raped in my life, nor anyone I know, so it’s not possible this can offend me in any way. Who is supposed to be offended here exactly? Rape victims? Homosexuals? If that’s the case, then I suppose jokes involving the word “walk” are offensive to everyone who’s in a wheelchair. The joke has the same comic value of a lolcat picture depicting a bird being stalked by a cat and with the phrase “rape is imminent” written on top. It is funny, and it’s not offensive. Unless you’re a rape victim and that word brings up bad memories or whatever. But in the end, that’s a problem you have to deal with, not me.
This, I can agree with.
But not here. I don’t see what’s funny - it’s probably some cultural difference. (Just as I have trouble understanding the world that prompted this game.
Don’t have the time or energy to educate you here, and it’s pretty plain that you’re not going to be receptive to it, so I’ll just state that you’re wrong, it’s unacceptable, and if you don’t understand why then it’s very much your problem.
Unacceptable? Millions of people are disagreeing with you, seeing for example how Jim Jeffries acts are getting such good ratings. To quote one of his jokes: “My girlfriend comes home and I’m raping her mother […] because I’m a mysterious guy.” And the whole joke[1] (which is too long to quote entirely here) was extremely funny.
So no, it’s not generally “unacceptable”. It’s appreciated by a hell of a lot of people. You just happen to belong to a group of people that don’t like it.
[1] youtube.com/watch?v=y-RJeqyh-vI (4:14)
Ditto. I don’t have much time for stuff like Space Moose, whose shtick seems to be “Ha ha look how offensive I can be and if you’re offended you’re a prude,” and it looks like Stiffy Makane belongs in the same barrel, which is a pity. But, disclaimer notwithstanding, ezfreeman probably doesn’t deserve any flack for it if Thornton doesn’t.
And for those who think that Planet IF still shows too much that isn’t IF, there is also the IF Dwarf Planet. Actually, I’d be interested in getting some help curating it, so if anyone is interested, please let me know.
[rant]
a) Somehow I manage to care about people who have had horrible things happen to them, even if they haven’t actually happened to me. Sometimes I do this before breakfast.
b) Even if you can only scrape up empathy for rape victims you know personally, I guarantee that you know people who have been raped (and almost as certainly people who have raped).
I won’t derail further, but I beg you to go learn about this stuff. It’s 2011, and you have the internet.[/rant]
I guess I’m a little fuzzy on what’s “real IF posting”. Ez’s posts, on the whole, seem to be, for lack of a better word, chatty, but that’s style: the content generally seems to be: WIP, games played recently, a comic related to IF, an apology for a comic related to IF, mentions of IF elsewhere, reviews of IF and other games, fiction related to the WIP, links to forum posts here that he thought were entertaining, the occasional shout-out to other IF bloggers, joke IF transcripts, an I7 extension recommendation . . .
I mean, I’ve only skimmed, but the blog theme does seem to be pretty IF-intensive. Maybe “not enough IF” is being used as code for something and I’m too dense to get it; in which case, someone PM me, please. (Are the other posters using Planet IF to pass spy messages? Coordinate runs across the US/Canadian border for Prozac? Is there money in it? Inquiring, impoverished minds want to know.)
This is disingenuous, of course. The whole point – and I use the word loosely here – of that comic was that rape was the joke, while stand-up uses it as a setup. Of course, when simply saying the word causes tittering among the audience, that may be a moot point.
It’s about privilege, of course. Rape is, in fact, only a joke in itself to people who don’t need to fear it and/or have not experienced it. They can afford to be smarmy about it because it’s not as it affects or bothers them. In that, it’s not substantially different from, say, a couple of men at a bar in the 1960’s joking about “stringin’ up the niggers”, OMG so edgy and transgressive and say, why isn’t that dour black-skinned fellow over there taking the joke? He’s standing there quietly judging them. For shame. I mean, everybody else is laughing… well, everybody of consequence. Why make a big deal out of it etc etc ad nauseam.
Well, it’s that, or it could be he possesses empathy[1]. Whether or not an act is acceptable is not determined by popularity. I hear genocide has been pretty popular throughout history, too, and yet survivors don’t seem so sanguine about the matter.
Maybe they just can’t take the joke either.
Comedy can never be 100% qualified, and every single joke in the world could offend somehow in some context, some subjects infinitely more easily to broad sections of people than others (like this comic.) That is why I don’t accept the stance that a piece of comedy/joke can ever be deemed inherently unnacceptable, as has happened in this topic. No matter what subject, you will find a venue where it’s been turned into comedy. Genocide’s been a big part of Mel Brooks repartee. I forget who said ‘comedy equals tragedy plus time’, but I know he said ‘Comedy is when I cut my finger. Tragedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.’ *** Edit - Doh, he said TRAGEDY is when I cut my finger, COMEDY is when you fall into an open sewer and die! ***
I don’t like people using ‘rape’ casually or in conversation (EG in sport (they’re raping us)), but I still can’t say ‘this comic is unnacceptable, end of story, you know why.’ Only that it’s likely to offend a zillion people for touching the subject it does, and I do know why.