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Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Internet Annoyances and Curiosities
There's been some question in the gay blogosphere if this ad from the Super Bowl should be considered offensive or not:
The joke here seems to be that casual homophobia is funny. Which, at this point, if you have to have why it's not funny, or appropriate, explained to you, well, there's probably no point explaining it to you. For myself, I find the ad more stupid than offensive, and it certainly doesn't make me want a candy bar.
What I found more troubling was the reaction videos Snickers used to have on their web-site, in which football players expressed disgust at the notion of two men kissing. Homophobia in professional sports is a real problem, and one that most American sports leagues have been more than willing to turn a blind eye to, and it's disheartening that advertisers would seek to profit off it.
This picture has also made the internet rounds lately:
Now, I look at that picture, and I see a very attractive man. But apparently most gay men online are looking at that picture and seeing a big, fat, disgusting, fat, piggy, fat-fattie.
How fucked up is the body image of most gay men that they look at Morrissey and see someone fat? I'm not ashamed to admit, he's in better shape than I am, and he's in much better shape than most Americans. But then the attitude of Americans towards their bodies is out-right schizophrenic; we're quite probably, if not certainly, the fattest nation on the planet, but we loathe any body-type that strays from an impossible notion of perfection, so this sort of thing really shouldn't surprise me.
I've become interested in the culture that has sprung up around massively multi-player games. Enough so, in fact, that I finally broke down and bought a copy of World of Warcraft. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone, as when I had played WOW before, I hadn't really liked it very much. The emphasis on the game is very much on grinding to the maximum level possible, and then running the same dungeons over and over again to collect better and better equipment. There are also a great deal of time-sinks built into the game, designed seemingly to keep you playing and distracted from the highly repetitive nature of the missions. I'm still continually baffled by some of the "loot" drop rates, which more often than not defy all common sense: "Go and bring me back eight wolf paws!" "Okie-dokie, that just means go out and kill two wolves. No problem." Three hours later... "Boy, I can't believe there were over two hundred paw-less wolves in this forest."
And the less said about crafting systems and auction houses and other manifestations of in-game economies, the better. No, the City of Heroes games are much more my speed. The missions aren't any less repetitive, but there's a "get on, beat bad guys up for an hour, team if you want to, log off" approach that suits my lifestyle a little better.
So, why did I get the game, if it's not really my sort of thing? For some variety, mostly. Now, when I want to pretend to be someone else, I have another option besides "superhero" or "supervillain." I even went a step beyond, and put the character who has evolved into my "main" on a role-playing server, a step I'd always been reluctant to do in other on-line games. I'm not sure why I ever hesitated, it's not as if anyone on the role-playing servers ever, you know, role-plays their characters, but it was the thought that counted. Plus, as I said, I'm finding myself intrigued by the cultural significance of MMO games, and WOW is definitely the biggest one out there, so it felt like it was worth investigating.
Plus, I played a little bit of a "free" MMO from a major publisher that was basically a complete and utter knock-off of World of Warcraft, but without a tenth of the charm or appeal but plenty of fanboy pandering geek humor. After seeing WOW done wrong, it suddenly made the real game look a thousand times more appealing.
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