seasleepy

It seems like they are caching the feeds on their end (but not the content of the feeds). So people just now adding the premium feeds are getting updates because it's a "new" feed (to Pocketcast's system), while the regular non-premium feed is stuck on their end/blocked on GB's end/not updating for whatever reason and so everyone on that feed is getting no updates. Looking at the Pocketcast account's twitter responses, they may have manually kicked the Presents feed which is why everyone got the Pixels episode yesterday.

This is super minor but I had noticed in the podcast apps I use that the descriptions for the podcasts were cut off fairly often. Finally took a look at the RSS feeds for the Bombcast, Beastcast, & Presents, and they're getting cut off at 255 characters (excluding encodings for apostrophes and the like). Doing some checking online, I can see that the <itunes:subtitle> element does have to be a max of 255 chars, but the <itunes:summary> and <description> elements are also being cut off at the same point even though they don't have that restriction (according to Apple, <itunes:summary> can be 4000 chars; all their other tags are restricted to 255).

(Apologies if this was already on the radar -- I tried searching the forums but nothing relevant came up in a search for the itunes XML tags.)

@aromaticflower: I suppose we just fundamentally disagree about what constitutes force then, because I'd never categorize a critic influencing creativity as "forcing" someone to do a thing.

@aromaticflower: I don't really get your argument here at all then. What you're implying is some (as you admit, vanishingly small) group of critics who particularly rely on social issues in their arguments to up the emotional impact are actually lying liars who bully or trick people into agreeing with them (which is, as I've tried to point out, is really ignoring the agency and intelligence of the people in question) for... reasons (personal gain? vendettas against certain people?).

I mean, I'm sure there are a few people out there to rabble-rouse, but I can't think of anyone with much influence in the gaming press who would match that description.

I also can't really think of why you'd bring it up here when you're clearly excluding Austin from this group.

(I realize this sounds a bit hostile but I am honestly genuinely confused as to what you're implying.)

@aromaticflower: But why would you signal-boost something like that if you weren't actually persuaded by the argument? Even if you agreed with it, the most likely result in that case might be that you might not like Futurama as much any more. Or that you might still like it overall but dislike that aspect of it.

At the core in any case, the argument still must be persuasive enough to change the listener's perspective even if it is appealing to emotion or morality.

I mean, I could write a piece going "Splatoon continues Nintendo's practices of erasing gay people!!! There's no representation whatsoever!!" which is technically accurate but somewhat misleading. I doubt it'd get much traction because it's not really a persuasive argument. (I can imagine that while you or others might ascribe bad faith to the person writing that article, I would probably just suspect that they were simply someone tremendously frustrated by years of poor representation.)

But I could also write a short piece about how there are some interesting ways that genders are differentiated within the game, focusing particularly the outfit gained from the Inkling Girl Amiibo (the body piece of which has a skirt if you put it on as a girl and does not if you put it on as a boy, and the head piece is a barrette on the girl and a ponytail holder on the boy) and the response would be a lot greater because it's actually based on something.

But those people a critic is "calling to arms" are only going to respond if they agree with the call. Or are you implying a large portion the people they are reaching out to are signal-boosting with an argument they disagree with or are indifferent towards due to believing they're morally obligated for some reason? It could happen, I suppose, but I'd imagine it's a vanishingly small proportion of the population. And it's really silly to ascribe bad faith to people on that scale.

@mctaters said:

This seems like a strange response to the industry's over-reliance on Metacritic. Should every game just get a top score because a reviewer doesn't want to be responsible for layoffs? If not, where do we draw the lines for what is reasonable criticism to include in scoring? Reviewers have to be allowed to write reviews that reflect their experience, because that is theoretically what the review is intended to reflect.

In the case that precipitated the thread, Gies found the sexualization so off-putting that it pulled him out of the game. Others did not find it so. Everyone's scores reflect their experiences. There isn't an objectively "correct" way to feel about it, so saying you must/must not include certain aspects of your experience in the score is...a really weird thing to say.

I actually watched all 10 minutes of that video to see the proof you're talking about and good grief, he talks briefly about how because you are trying to stop sex trafficking in one part of Watch_Dogs, so having naked ladies as set dressing is fine, and then the rest is excising one short clip about Hitman from her latest video (replayed several times), doing "analysis" on how a few LPs went through that section of that particular game (to prove she was being "unfair"), and then trying to claim that it proves she's pulled something over, and then appealing to another Youtuber (and also GDC??) to stop falling for her lies. (The sections he is complaining about are in a video regarding sexualized women as set dressing. I don't really see how they don't fit.)

Really don't see how it proves she's not a gamer or that she's discredited by anything in it. (Especially since you do have people like Patrick who have talked to her and are fine with her gamer "creds".)

@kvfinn said:

The thing that drives me crazy is GG acted like they discovered something new and sinister that Fish was considered twice and how come nobody talked about it, it must be evidence of the indie cabal hivemind etc. ....And I went "but that totally was a big thing though, wasn't it??" and found that article by literally just googling "phil fish igf". For people that claim they follow gaming super closely, they certainly seem to keep "discovering" things that other people have been talking about for years.

@adamwd: She's a lady who likes games and a feminist media critic. I had seen a few of her videos (example, this series) before the gaming Kickstarter.