AAAAAAAAAAA YEAH MOTHERFUCKER! All the terrible websites are dying! Twitter, Kiwi Farms, Fanbyte, and now Waypoint!
I originally had this long post where I aired out all my grievances about Waypoint’s staff, and the games “journalism” industry at large, but I scrapped all that and decided that it would be better for me to LOL out loud and be a petty bitch. It was a shit site staffed by terrible people; incels, chasers, transphobes, rape apologists, capitalist bootlickers (all the stars are here), who’s shoddy idea of investigative journalism ruined people’s lives. Maybe don’t have your first full-time writer be the same guy who wrote a bunch of creepy shit on Kotaku about trying to look up nude photos of my friend on Kiwi Farms, then when he couldn’t find them, told the world she was a pedophile, and ultimately playing a big role in her leaving public life entirely. As a quick aside, a little ProTip from someone who never went to college, let alone got my parents to buy me a journalism degree: if you’re covering a story of a woman at the center of a right-wing harassment campaign getting fired from her marketing job for some unspecified “moonlighting,” maybe instead of diving headfirst into gossip and both-sidesing message boards that use the n-word like punctuation and giving credence to the idea that she’s some child-touching prostitute secretly making changes to bad tactical RPGs, you could have maybe asked the more pressing question of why someone at a fairly important position at the largest most recognized game company in the world was being paid so little she felt the need to take a second job in the first place, regardless of if it was some dreaded sex work or not, Patrick Klepek you fucking incel ass clown bitch. But hey, why let things like actual ethics or having a fucking brain get in the way of ruining a woman’s life because you couldn’t get your dick hard while visiting the nazi forum? Pretty cool that someone I was friends with, and who was one of the first people to support me getting back into making art after a twenty-something year hiatus (and during a time when frankly, nobody should have been enabling the shit I was pumping out), has more or less vanished off the face of the Earth and I haven’t seen or heard from her in years. Hopefully, she’s doing well.
Also maybe don’t hire a shitty transphobe that’s spent nearly a decade being mad whenever a trans woman does something that reminds her that we’re human beings. Or you know, actively had a hand in ruining a lot of my friends careers and lives, all because they committed the heinous crime of being trans on a Wednesday or something equally nonsensical. I’d go further, but I think I’ve talked enough shit about Gita Jackson to last all of us a lifetime, so I won’t. But I will ask if you remember when she went off on some trans writer, called her a pedophile (real weird how the P-Word keeps coming up whenever a games journo gets mad at society’s undesirables, huh), then wrote some rant accusing anyone of writing about their sex lives to be a predator because “nobody wants to see that shit,” then proceeded to ignore her own threat to write out a list of sex acts she wanted to do with Chet Hanks, a man notorious for his lack of legal troubles involving women and women’s boundaries. Anyways, I just thought that was interesting.
this isn’t exactly a post that lends itself well to image breaks, so i’ll show off a screenshot from the game boy game i’m working on
It was a big maddening at first, then pitiable, then funny, to see a lot (a lot) of very dumb motherfuckers online eulogizing this like it’s fucking 9/11. Too weird to live, too rare to die, like you’re talking about Bowie and having to acknowledge the era where he was infamously on enough coke to kill an elephant and nobody told him that wearing Hugo Boss was a bad idea. Everyone doing their damndest to try and beat Dax Harwood for being the Biggest Ball Licker of 2023. But whatever, I guess we’ll miss out on all that great writing. Now where will I go to read about predatory gacha games actually being good? Where will I go when I need a eugenics-loving American to squint their eyes and say “ching chong bing bong” at a Japanese game? How will we in the public ever make it without up-to-the-minute updates letting us know that a sexual assault survivor is actually totally lying about it in order to subject an innocent rapist to the dreaded epidemic known as cancel culture, and doing so as racistly as possible? Where can we go to see the most leftist-communist who is definitely not a right-winger doing a grift find a new trans woman who then will be held responsible for the ills of the world for the next decade, despite her only rolling out of bed like an hour ago and having exactly zero influence on the world at large? Where will we go to read thoughts and opinions about games from people who openly despise games, and only use them as either a way to score points in the world’s stupidest culture war, or as a stepping stone to a fulfilling career writing “chicks with dicks” jokes for a late night talk show host? Maybe it’s because everyone crying about this have smoothed out their brains playing Harry Potter and posting way too much on Elon Musk Presents Twitter Dot Com after him and his reinstated nazi buddies openly celebrated the Club Q Nightclub shooting, but back in my day, we would celebrate when bigots and assholes got shitcanned. Maybe I’m just getting old.
In any case, fuck ’em. They’re gone and I’m still here. The sooner we get away from this shitty little venture capitalist funded clique that only exists to do harm to both people and a medium that deserves better, well, the better. Games are fucking great, in spite of the shitty industry that makes them, covers them, and consumes them (at least here in the west). Maybe this fracturing of social media, and the collapse of all these sites (crossing my fingers on the bubble of YouTube video essays bursting too) might finally give us back an internet where individuals had a voice. Maybe we can finally see more than a handful of people who can actually cover games with any degree of respect, not being overshadowed by Hot Takes and shitty headlines specifically designed to piss off reactionaries, which in turn will direct harassment at anyone defending you. Maybe it won’t; maybe we’ve reached a point of no return regarding the digital world being taken over by get-rich quick schemes and profit margins. But fuck me, dude, it would be cool if we could at least try. Everything is so cynical and so stupid.
I can’t pretend that I have all the answers, I would be leading the world instead of talking shit about a dying gaming website if I did. I started writing about games as a teenager because I like them, and I like talking about them. Just imagine, such a wild concept: writing about something because you like it. Hard to imagine these days, because everything has to have an angle because nobody believes a fucking word that comes out of their own mouths. No wonder there’s so much hate and toxicity coming out of that scene. But I’m getting a bit philosophical because it is very late, so I’ll stop here. Rest in fucking shit, Waypoint. The world will miss you, even though they really shouldn’t. Games criticism will survive, even thrive, without Gavin McInnes’ blood money and a freak show of fake allies who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
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