Author: Joey deVilla

Joseph Keckler, a New York-based performance artist, sings and plays piano in this beautiful, haunting, and hilarious opera piece in which he plays a bored office worker turning into his former goth teen self as he walks through New York City’s St. Marks Place. Listening to the piece, I thought: damn, this is pretty good!

And while we’re at it, enjoy the original 12″ single of Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead:

Thanks for nothing, Jian.

Yesterday evening, Anita Sarkeesian (in case you haven’t heard of her, here’s a good intro) tweeted this:

A few days ago I got an exciting media interview request, so this morning I hopped on a plane to NYC. More to come!

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 29, 2014

A few minutes ago as of this writing, she tweeted this picture:

Expect a lot of gnashing of teeth on parts of 8Chan, A Voice for Men, a few subreddits, and other internet hangouts for misogynerds, as well as for some butthurt guy to add Stephen Colbert’s name to the “Mangina” entry in WikiMANNia (yes, it’s a real thing).

Don’t get it? Read it again, very carefully.

The moral of this story: always proofread your work. And use lots of lube.

Thanks to Peach Flambee for the find!

Wondermark comic by David Malki. Click to see the source.

In a new post on Medium, Andy Baio (creator of Upcoming, former board member and CTO of Kickstarter, blogger at Waxy.org, co-founder of the XOXO Festival, and yes, a friend of mine) writes:

Two months ago today, actor Adam Baldwin was the first to use the #Gamergate hashtag on Twitter, solidifying a name for the movement that’s dominated all conversations in gaming since. Depending on where you sit on the issue, it’s either a widespread campaign of harassment against women or, actually, about ethics in videogames journalism.

Anyone who’s mentioned the #Gamergate hashtag in a critical light knows the feeling: a swarm of seemingly random, largely-anonymous people descending to comment and criticize.

I’ve been using Twitter for eight years, but I’ve never seen behavior quite like this. This swarming behavior is so prevalent, it got a new nickname — “sea lioning,” inspired by David Malki’s Wondermark comic [pictured above — Joey].

Also worth reading: Andy’s essay, in which he describes his findings from running an analysis of three days’ worth of tweets with the hashtags #Gamergate and #NotYourShield. His findings:

• Most of the tweets — about 69% — were retweets.
• Many of [Gamergate’s] proponents are using newly-created, often pseudonymous, accounts.
• Roughly 25% of all Gamergate activity is from account created in the last two months, which is about when the whole mess began.
• There’s little overlap between the communities. If you take a look at this closeup of a graph showing the connections, the pro-Gamergate site includes such charming Twitter accounts as RooshV (the pickup artist about whom I wrote earlier), the account for the “Red Pill” site Return of Kings, and MGTOWKnight (MGTOW is short for Men Going Their Own Way). If you wondered why the Gamergate crowd sounds a lot like the “Mens’ Rights” man-babies, it’s because their causes are aligned. I’m quite content not to get mixed in with that sorry lot.
• The top RTed users are pro-Gamergate; the top RTed tweets are against.

The concluding statement is a good summary:

This network visualization is as good a metaphor as any for #Gamergate. Two massive, impenetrable hairballs of people that want little to do with one another, only listening to their side and firing volleys across the chasm.

Andy’s made his data available to everyone. If you’ve got the time and the data-crunching skills, you can download the data he used in CSV format or as a MySQL dump (each is about 40MB in size).

A number of people have recently asked me about getting a suit on a budget, and I pointed them to the guides at Primer (they also have a good one on suit and sport jackets), Everyguyed, and Dappered. They’re all good jumping-off points.

If you do have a court date, it’s doubly important that dress well. Don’t be like “Tayla the Manatee Slaya”, pictured below…

(Need the back story? Read How NOT to dress for your manatee sport-humping court date.)