Rest In Peace, TotalBiscuit.
mmmmmm ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
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May he find as much peace as he granted his targets. For someone who loved āGet cancerā as a thing to throw at his targets, thereās some bitter cosmic irony that it would catch up with him.
(Which is to say, when someoneās spent years directing death threats against others, doxxing people, & driving people to suicide, he doesnāt get to have all that forgotten)
-CrystalDave on MetaFilter, regarding TotalBiscuitās passing
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john bain was an abrasive man who, to be generous, verged on idiocy; but he died in a shitty way, he did so with grace, and he was capable of abundant kindness to those he was close to. he was also really good for starcraft, which, yes, sounds trivial, and is certainly of more idiosyncratic importance to me than to anyone else here, but within that scene he was responsible for giving people careers in a way that he was not obligated to do, and his general enthusiasm for the game and the people involved in it made his extensive financial support of the competitive scene more pointed. he doesnāt have to be forgiven for his transgressions, but they donāt have to be the only part of his story either. make of it what you will.
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I hope that when I die, Iāll be remembered for how I was a nice person to other cishet white dudes like me, and not how quickly I would turn my horde of shitty followers onto people who I felt I had some kind of righteous cause against, and/or women
Rot in hell, hat man
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This dude was a gamergate ringleader, letās not eulogize his hateful ass. For all the people he gave careers to, there are probably 5 times as many women heās driven out of careers.
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Huh. The only gaming community I ever got into was IC/SB and honestly donāt really know much specifically about what most of the IC/SB posters ever did, outside the forum. Even inside the forum, I have never been up on most of the meta behavior.
The only thing I knew of TotalBiscuit were modding videos for Bethesda games, preview play impressions for stuff like Battlefield. Etc. I thought he was just a pretty good youtube channel. I guess not. And hopefully my āR.I.P.ā Post is not seen as support for gamergate or anything else negative he may have done. Gamergate is one of the most awful things I have ever seen. The fact it was born from within a culture about games, confounds me.
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I honestly didnāt really know who totalbiscuit was until he died, but the comments in the MetaFilter thread on him gave a pretty good picture and this kind of speaks for itself:
The way I see it, this is an astonishingly rare instance of karma actually working the way itās supposed to. Maybe thatās callous of me, but performative respect for horrible people when they die is one of those centrist liberal reflexes I despise.
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Itās been mentioned above but I have to restate it because he hurt people close to me:
John Bain was a gamergate supporter and directly responsible for some of the pain my friends went through.
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If we were in an axe thread TMKF would post the Simpsons scene where Marge says āAnd let us never speak of him againā
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I mean these are kind of mutually exclusive statements. It should take more than one tweet for you to be glad someone died of cancer at 33. I dunno man thatās just my Hot Take.
he did apologize for that tweet specifically, to the person in question. I once told someone who is on this very forum to kill themselves and then apologized the next day. itās not a great look, but I donāt think I deserve to die for it.
TBās involvement in GG was overblown, I think, but it was not nonexistent. he was one of those guys who actually did believe in Ethics In Gaming Journalism. that phrase is a phrase that is meaningless to me, I donāt give a shit about it, you donāt give a shit about it, but it was a cross he was willing to die on before GG made it a cover for hatred. he took that belief in unfortunate directions when GG hit its stride because he was thin skinned, abrasive, egotistical in his conclusions, and not particularly nuanced, which meant that when things broke a certain way and he was questioned or criticized he went all in. thatās not a unique story in the world of ideology, itās just a sad one. it caused harm. heās responsible for that.
TBās actions are enough to turn him into a cartoon villain to some people, and that just is what it is. I have that line too, Iāll piss on some graves. TBās isnāt one of them, but regardless it should at least take a more serious thought process to get there. morally, to me, but also because itās a dangerous action to write off someoneās humanity. once you do that you donāt care how they got to that point, because you just consider them a monster. that has consequences, intellectually and ethically.
personally, I didnāt even like TB before GG, much less after, but before it was not hard to acknowledge his positive traits, which were about as exaggerated as his negatives ones, and to similar effect. after, it just became a sort of tragedy. and thatās what I find myself reflecting on.
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at best you are calling this man extremely simple minded
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I am absolutely calling him that. and worse things. but not exclusively.
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Yeah OK I feel you
Obviously this is not a fair characterization of where Iām coming from here.
My main motivation this morning is that I donāt want this community to be seen as praising a gamergate ringleader. That organized misogynist harassment campaign caused a ton of harm, and the āgaming communityā has completely failed to reckon with it. SelectButton is a rare videogame-focused community that consistently vocally repudiates gamergate, and I want to keep it that way.
And TotalBiscuit acting like a dick on Twitter isnāt the reason Iām glad heās gone. Iām glad heās gone because he had a massive platform and instead of using it responsibly, he used it to push hatred and incite harassment against marginalized members of his community.
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I know being consistently above the fray isnāt a great look to a lot of people but jsyk this isnāt ever at the remotest risk of changing, those guys are stupid as hell and totally beneath consideration. Weāre not, like, fighting against them, weāre a place you can hang out to not have to ever deal with their shit
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Letās split the difference: Iām glad he no longer has a platform nor produces content; Iām neutral regarding his death.
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āIf heās so smart, how come heās dead?ā
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