The Giant Beastcast: Episode 79

Austin!!

Austin!!

Kanye East in the house!!

Ahhhh the BEASTCAST. Love you guys

Professaahhhhh Kiiiillaaaaaahhhhh

Always a pleasure having Austin on. Thanks for finding the time in your busy schedule to swing back for Beastcast funtimes, Austin!

Austin Walker aka Bars von Trier

Austin Walker aka Earn Cheese Sanders

This Austin Walker boy is a treasure.

AUSTIN AUSTIN AUSTIN AUSTIN AUSTIN

Austin + Vinny + Sleeping Dogs sounds like the best podcast ever.

@billmcneal: Walker!!!

It's SherLocke Homes!

Perfect time for a Beastcast!

What's good internet? It's the Giant Austincast!

AUSTIN! *clap clap clap*
AUSTIN! *clap clap clap*

<3 Austin.

Ahh yeah Austin!

Any chance we could have Beastcast format where the first or second half is about games & the other half is all the movies/tv/other discussion? It would save a heck of a lot of time and keeps the show on some semblance of rails.

I'm with Vinny. Cheese and Mayo sandwiches are the tits.

Beastcast with Austin is indeed the bestcast.

A Sleeping Dogs sequel in China is everything I ever wanted. Damnit.

Man is that talk about that anime fighting game getting disqualify because people dont like people with anime avatar real? because that shit was gross to hear and i dont even like that game.

Listen I have a giantbomb avatar, I have it because I love giantbomb. Now if someone assume I am a certain type of person because of the type of avatar I have I would honestly be disgusted with that person. I thought we wanted to make gaming inclusive and here we are again railing on people who merely enjoy a different type of entertainment because you know "anime" gross dude. and no I wont take that "o a bunch of anime avatar on twitter are gross so all anime are gross now" Here let me rephrase that ignorant shit for you. "o a bunch of white supremacist are really being scary and gross after trump win so now all white people are gross" I will just let this gross shit sit and see if anyone want to defend it.

This is not the first time this attitude have come up around gaming and even though anime itself have largely push me off of it completely, I really dont want to be a part of the gaming community that act like douche bag highschool jocks.

@shinjin977: Completely agree with you. I don't even care about Anime (besides Dragon Ball) and even I have felt the same way you describe. Someone being dismissive about someone else's opinion just because of their avatar is ridiculous and it's really disappointing that this complaining of "hurr durr you have an anime avatar" usually comes from people that make arguments about how gaming community should be more inclusive.

I've seen this come up on Twitter sometimes. Like, someone gives a really controversial opinion just to stir shit up and then a few minutes later complain "A lot of people with anime avatars are mad at me. Your opinions don't count.".

I guess we should all go back to the default avatars from each social media just so all opinions can be accepted without judgment based on frivolous things.

Go @austin_walker go

@johnymyko: I mean that's definitely not gonna work the Twitter Egg is probably a way worse sign of potential trouble than an anime avatar.

o7

Kanye East in da house!!

@efesell: Indeed. But if everyone was a Twitter Egg then no one could complain based on avatars because everyone was using the same one.

"Book"

The Galactus of the Game.

@shinjin977: To be fair, I've only seen this sort of shit around twitter, nobody else cares if you have Anime avatars or not. I understand why you're upset though, because this is just another way too overblown issue. I would feel offended too if for instance suddenly everyone would hate on Amiga games for no reason just because idiots giving those games a bad name. But with that said, therein lies the problem that its about trolls giving a thing a bad name, as always. This is a common problem I've seeing all over the net though and is rather difficult to battle against since trolling is a very easy thing to do.

Theres all sorts of disgusting ad-hominem shit out there over at twitter that is dumb and needless. If anything, the opinion the user has is to blame and not the avatar. If people are serious about this "Anime Avatar makes you a terrible person" thing then they're missing the point, but I never seen people being serious about it anyway, so for me it is hard to tell if there are lots of people being serious about it. Often, most controversal opinions on twitter is about steering stuff up without much substance beyond that, that much is true as @johnymyko already stated anyway.

Some criticism to you (@shinjin977) though, what you're doing is basically what Austin Powers does as a joke, which is looking at the mole while not noticing the entire rest of the human. Maybe there is more to it than you think? You can't just point fingers at people and cry "bigot" without knowing about the situation of what caused it, which is always a individual issue which requires propper investigation and research. I'd say you're just as bad as the people you are crying foul about. With this written down, I think that people thinking that Anime Avatars are a real threat that can be used as a argument to dismiss the entire range of Entertainment (Anime, Manga, Games, etc) are worse. Mostly because that means that the Trolls have "won" so to speak. People really should take more issue on the subject of trolls and trolling rather than the correlate the subject these people are invovled with so people don't start to "draw the lines" in the first place. Talking about Anime Avatars talking shit and being overly insensitive towards a subject only obfuscates on the real issues here.

What I mean about that is that I've never seen people "putting opinions out there" and suddenly a entire form of entertainment is deemed terrible. Thats just absurd, a logical step you have to do is to ask yourself where and why these things do happen? From my point of view, which stems from observing the situation over at the drama factory that is called twitterdotcom, it is always people pestering others with their opinion directly via ad-hominem attacks and being overly emotional. Naturally the counterreaction is to do the same. If anything, the system has problems and what you're stating is nothing but a symptom regarding the real problem, which is people directly being connected but threated as "factors to be fought against" rather than considering that they're talking to real people.

Besides, I've never seen hating on Anime avatars on other places. From weeks/months of looking at such pityful drama out of interest, curiosity and boredom it seems like a meme to me more than anything else. No idea why people would even start to take such a thing seriously.

Some constructive criticism would be to look into the issue directly, if the majority of Anime Avatars just want to stir shit up, then those people are trolls "clothed" to give certain things a bad name and people should definatly reach out to actively make others understand that those people give Animefans a bad name rather than letting people paint other unrelated groups of people with board brushes, which is obviously a terrible approach as you already wrote.

Furthermore, people are not forced to like and accept everyone and I've seen stuff like hentai related Anime Avatars out there. You can't force people to accept things they may not like but this doesn't mean that these people who have these avatars are automatically trolls, which is a rather obvious assumption, at least for me. Fans of anime should be disgussed that there are people (trolls) giving this form of Entertainment a bad name by thowing out controversal stuff while insulting people, these issues should be looked at the individual level and be handled as such, which seems like the most sensible approach to me.

EDIT: I really want to emphasize this also. I've also often see people blaming on Anime Avatars who also seem like fans of Anime themselves, so maybe there is an extra layer to this underlying problem with this sort of bigotry also. I also fixed some bad Grammar and made stuff more readable :P.

I like how Vinnys guilty pleasure food is just a cheese sandwich with mayo. Is mayo in a sandwich not a regular occurrence in the US? It's pretty much the standard in the UK (well that or butter)

It's probably more the plain cheese sandwich part that isn't super common.

@dray2k: Thanks for taking the time to read my long ass post but you are putting a whole lot of words in my mouth that I did not say. First off, I dont have twitter and have no interest to get one. The only time I have heard of this "anime avatar people are crap people" thing is straight from the giantbomb content(lang, patrick, guests, brad, now austin so this have happen a couple of times and each time it rubs me the wrong way). I dont know what goes on on twitter and honestly I dont really care. Furthermore, I have no interest in giving anime a good name and this is not even really about liking anime, I dont like anime. I would be equally disappointed if people had said "man people with fucking rapper avatar are the worst".

and let me fix a couple of misconception you seem to have by saying I NEVER call anyone a bigot (as a matter of fact my original post is above unedited), my example with the white nationalist is only to show the parallel warped logic. Furthermore I never said everyone must like and accept everything, what I said was, austin slyly mention that an "anime fighter" a great one by all account was disqualify from some award because of people being fed up with "anime avatar" people on twitter being toxic. Now I, being a complete outsider from all this (dont like anime, dont like fighter, dont even care about the award) looking in, I thought if true, is a disgrace to the gaming scene as a whole. Maybe my post was too long and not straight enough to the point. Let me sum it up nice and easy.

Yo stop generalizing things and demonizing a whole group of people because of a few asshole's action. We cant preach inclusiveness and tolerance then turn around and do the exact opposite of that and by the way last time I look it was gamers being look down upon by society for liking some low form entertainment. Now some of us are doing exactly that to another group.

Yaaaay Austin!

I agree with you 100%, each time I each time I see posts about anime avatars or games or just where people dismiss stuff based on a style or something different to their preference. like I watched a final fantasy preview the other day and the people previewing it just said "they all look like assholes" and my first thought is I don't understand that so if a fashion or culture is different they look like an asshole?

This crap does need to stop it just rubs me the wrong way.

Nitroplus Blasterz? Hell no! Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator is the one that got shafted.

Aksys have done everything right with that series and no one seems to give a shit.

Curse you, Beastcast! That Square Enix bit was almost exactly my CoolGames Inc submission this week!

@shinjin977: Oh my, I appologize for putting words into your mouth, I really didn't want to do that. Often enough these discussions are really rather disingenuous, though you may argue that those trolls are to blame of such general atmosphere, so I often go what people are implying rather than stating. I didn't certainly want to imply that you said things you didn't want to say either way. I also was stating the Anime Avatar thing because it got bought up, and I didn't say that you're a bigot but people labling others with board brushes. Of course labling someone a bigot should be handled with a bit of nuance, which is why I used ""s and elaborated a bit in my previous post where I believe the real problem lies. I've done those before I edited my long previous post but it shouldn't matter. I only edit when I see room to fix bad grammer or elaborate, like with this very sentence here.

Regardless, you've made yourself clear enough so theres no need for you to sum it up again for me and others so its nice of you that you care enough about the topic that you're doing it. I probably would do the same if someone approaches me confused since its a murky situation after all. I have to say though, my previous post is about 4 times as large as yours so you shouldn't assume that I'm unable to comphrehend your text since I can fathom mine so that comes off as a little disingenuous and even a bit rude of you. No grudge regardless :). Maybe I've took it the wrong way.

Let me explain a bit though, I did not want to come up as disingenuous or anything. First off, I think that the hate on Anime Avatars originated over at Twitter, which is why I am referring to it often. I believe that communication over at social media is so murky (lack of transparency, where are these people coming from? What are their intentions?) that people became cautious and even started to label groups of people, even if its just a juxtaposition. It seems that way since 140 characters on twitter only serves for even more hyperbolic statements, which you also have to take in mind. Nobody knows exactly whats going on all the times also, since Twitter is a really rather fast moving media. And with that I do not even mean the Anime Avatar thing, but generally spoken to all groups. People want video games to become inclusive, but often enough theres a lot of bullshit that is in the way of that. I'm with the sentiment that you should not ignore the trolls, otherwise they will just keep going and make the situation worse for everyone if the system doesn't change.

You wrote about demonizing, but who made up their own demons first? The trolls or those who speak in generalizing terms (for lack of a better term)? Why is the situation as it is? In my eyes its more of a chicken and egg question.

Certainly, even if you say that you do not looked at twitter, why are you so upset about the situation without looking what is really going on? That doesn't make one bit of sense to me, just hearing a couple of negative things and then become this angry about it. I've listened to the Beastcast and that part didn't seem serious and more like a joke, but I can see why this may be a problem with some people because the joke didn't have a good impact. And I don't think the Giant Bomb team have a grudge against certain groups and Austin is a fan of Anime himself, so is Vinny, who is really careful what rude things people say during his podcast. It all doesn't seem to add up to me. I think that its absurd to think that Anime Avatars are the cause of Nitro+ Blasterz being excluded. No idea why people even argue about this not being a joke that backfired, I'd say that Vinnys response made it pretty clear if Austins way to present it isn't any clue on why I think it is one.

So whats your criticism other than "don't label people the wrong way"? I also would like for people to stop doing so, but that means that people have to understand why they're acting this way. Otherwise we're doing nothing else to help people understanding the situation and are further poisoning the well. Why are people turning into trolls and become full of vitriol? Why are people labeling sides with broad brushes (those aren't mutually exclusive terms by the way)? These are the questions we should ask first instead of being just upset about it.

One thing about Anime Avatars™, I do enjoy Austin Walkers interactions on Twitter regarding that. I've never seen him being rude to the people there (as far as I know), in fact all people who he replied to having such a thing seem to be OK people who weren't being shouty/angry at all (just acting normal like people on here do) and some of them were even fans of him and Giant Bomb/Waypoint visibly over at their feed and it seems a little bit weird that you're upset about him. In fact hes one of the main reasons I think that this situation with people being angry at people with Anime Avatars (which is sorta funny if you think about it) is way more overblown than it really is.

Of course I don't know a whole lot since I spend like 5-10 minutes every day looking at some twitter feeds and I've been doing that for a couple of months now so I can't say.

@scottjay01: This...doesn't seem like you're reading good reviews then, Character Designs are a important thing in a video game, but the way you're writing it seems like that the person who did the preview was just taking the piss out of the game. Who even does this sort of thing?

EDIT: Fixed and added stuff because I fucked up with syntax and wanted to take your concerns seriously. Hope this clears everything up. Also meant Preview instead of Review.

@dray2k: It's not that I'm not reading good reviews (I never mentioned reviews?)I was using that as an example of a broader tone that I've seen allot of lately in loads of places. Character designs are important and in the example of FFXV (barring when the final clothes were done in 2010) the characters have always looked the same since announced, however from people previewing it to everyday folk they dismiss it as they're emo in some places more derogatory remarks like assholes ect ect. Without the style and culture of that games country of origin even being taken into account. Not all games should be with a big jacked up dude or a dude with a shaved head.

Hey its my first episode!

@scottjay01: Oh wow, I typed review instead of preview. Happens if you have to type much sometimes. Will fix :)! Since I wrote so much, I did other stuff beside that so there were tons of mistakes that I've fixed already.

Also I agree with ya, people should be professional and not dismissive. But I never read a review that was this dismissive as what you've discribed but I've watched some inflammatory stuff about video games at youtube so theres that.

Die Antwoord (The Answer) is pronounced more like Dee Aunt Vwordt.

I feel so much smarter when I listen to Austin. I miss his presence at Giant Bomb.

This podcast continues to be completely hilarious.