John Walker's Electronic House

In our 178th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, isn’t it about time we acknowledged the “women in the workplace” experiment should come to an end.

We begin with rememberings of our first go on the internet, and then inevitably move on to the Charlie Hebdo story. Nick gives a short lecture on the nature of problematic religions, interrupted by a problematic wife, before we undo the nonsense of the argument that satire must only “punch up”.

We talk irony and the science of Mornington Crescent, and then John rants about how The Unbelievable Truth is a terrible radio concept. Then we somehow find ourselves dissecting the careers of Whose Line contestants, and ponder the descent of Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy. And we call Mitch Benn names, again.

BY THE WAY Thomas Aquinas Day has been cancelled, due to his having been a massive anti-Semite. So we’ve moved it to the 29th January, recognising Emanuel Swedenborg Day, master scientist turned loopy theologian. Please remember to book this day off work. Further instructions of the traditions to be applied to this international holiday will be revealed soon.

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

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Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/178_rumdoings.mp3]

In our 177th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, should there be a pink card in football for players who’ve done too many rapes?

What CLICK we CLICK talk CLICK about CLICK instead CLICK is oh dear. Nick messed up. Despite a pleasant enough start, discussing pedo royals, about five minutes in Nick’s recording goes crazy and starts clicking like a Geiger counter inside a nuclear bomb. If you can stand it, we go on to talk about late night chat shows, we close down all network TV and replace it with radio, and get an update on John’s baby. We point out that hoverboards are a stupid idea, how we need dinosaurs back to humble mankind, and the most importantly of all…

DECLARE THOMAS AQUINAS DAY ON 28TH JANUARY.

Book the day off now, as this is to be a new international holiday for all Rum Doings listeners, to give us something to look forward to when returning to work after Christmas!

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/177_rumdoings.mp3]

I think the most depressing thing on American television – and more so than the predictably and necessarily awful horror of stations like Fox News – are late night talk shows. While I’m too young to have anything to say about Carson, the last two stultifying decades of Leno and Letterman at 11.35pm were a miserable, stagnant waste. Leno was widely hated by his contemporaries from the start (getting Carson’s slot when everyone had assumed it was going to Letterman) and even more so by the end (screwing over Conan O’Brien in a way that deserves its own movie), though he was immensely popular with an audience of America’s 370 year olds. Letterman, for reasons I have never truly understood (but suspect may mostly be a inversion of the disgust focused on Leno), has always been heralded as the master of his craft, and championed by so many American comics. Both were equally vapid, cowardly, and tedious. Neither moved the format a millimetre further forward in their twenty years hosting a nightly programme.

Both shows followed precisely the same format. An opening monologue of over-written-to-death topical gags from a writers room of comics who would never utter such banality in their own acts, delivered as only jokes written by someone else for you can be. Then some ‘wacky’ sketches or bits, accompanied by interminable gurning to camera. Then two or three interviews with celebrity guests, each rehearsed, agreed upon, signed off on by agents and managers, and then delivered in staccato question: monologue; question: monologue; request for plug: plug. No surprises, no movement, no inspiration.

Accompanying this would be a house band led by a sycophantic yes-man, whose role was to laugh into a microphone at the host’s pre-scripted ad-libs, while punchlines were accompanied by brass band stings, presumably to help audiences locate them. Said studio audience’s role was to excessively clap and whoop (because laughter is a sound created by pleasant surprise at humour, while whooping and clapping can be queued) to fill perhaps a third of any show’s running time.

I write all this in the past tense rather inaccurately. While Leno may have mercifully finally gone this year, Letterman is dragging his kooky looks to camera, unfathomably poorly written Top 10 Lists, and familiarity with female staff, out until May 2015. And although Jimmy Fallon may be a far more likeable person than Leno (but then again, so would a slab of concrete), and although the writing is enormously better, it’s still the same stale format being dragged further on. Meanwhile Conan’s TBS show sinks ever deeper into its own smug satisfaction, and despite its actually getting better ratings than Letterman, no one has ever met anyone who watches ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live Exclamation Mark.

The real magic happened at 12.35.

(continue reading…)

So, a quick question.

Has the Sun really taken the photo of the Brit who was on board the missing Malaysian plane QZ8501, and massively photoshopped it? Tidied his earlobes, coloured his hair, and, well, whitened his skin? Because that would be… really bloody weird, right?

Or has the Mirror aged him? It’s really odd.

Mirror’s front page pic:

Sun’s front page pic:

Both seem to be reworked from the original from his LinkedIn page:

In our 176th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, should snow be mandatory at Christmas?

With a very special seven week old guest, this week’s episode comes from Nick, John and Toby. We discuss stupid babies, stupid Theresa May, the divinity of the Lord Baby Jesus, and the awfulness of carols. We ponder four year old logic, Nick genuinely proselytises Strictly Come Dancing, and then we skewer Apple right through their hearts. It turns out neither of us is a huge fan of Bob Geldof, but we are big fans of Judge Coxcombe. And baby willies.

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/176_rumdoings.mp3]

In our 175th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, when will someone finally stand up for the good-old British cabbie?

Instead we talk about John’s becoming a daddy, and John’s going to a mental health nurse. We talk about anxiety disorder, then the truncated You & Yours. There’s ranting about the ridiculous nonsense of feeding programmes for two-day-old babies and enforced formula use, and then learn some homeopathic uses for arsenic.

John talks about the best and worst things about being a dad, and then some suggestions of videogames for little children to play.

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/175_rumdoings.mp3]

In our 174th ever Rum Doings, our topic is, isn’t it about time to renationalise One Direction?

In an episode beset by a strange satellite delay (we talk over each other more than usual), we dominantly discuss how lovely and thoughtful John is, and Nick’s hate for all humanity. We consider the bath/wee dilemma as posted by 5 year old Judy. There’s shouty arguments over terms like “trigger warning”, and Nick’s contempt for John is laid bare. But actually it’s about ethics in games journalism, as well as Nick’s frustration with John’s interactions with the arseholes. Finally there’s some chat about giving birth and becoming dads.

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/174_rumdoings.mp3]

In our 173rd ever Rum Doings, our topic is should ebola be required for airline travel?

We discuss Nick’s mighty teeth, the inevitable appearance of a Walker baby, the complete absence of learning anything useful at middle school, and then dive deep into the insane world of idiotic conspiracy magazine, Nexus New Times. We learn about giant spiders, the Jesuit control of Australia, and the cover-up of anti-gravity.

And here’s talk Nick mentions:

If you don’t leave a review on iTunes then everyone will die. Thank you to everyone who has so far – you’re keeping the human race alive.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @rumdoings. If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, which apparently people still do, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

Or you can listen to it right here:

[audio: http://rumdoings.jellycast.com/files/audio/173_rumdoings.mp3]

I need to put this in one place, to stop myself from having to tweet it eighteen trillion times.

GG got very cross yesterday and overnight with my having written about how much abuse and harassment I received. I mentioned that I’d received thousands of unpleasant tweets. I came to this figure based on an average bad evening of it would see 500+ tweets coming in, and this happened multiple times. Within them were a number of extremely unpleasant and distressing tweets, with demands that I kill myself and so forth. This was one of them (which GG has been desperately trying to declare can’t be anything to do with them because of X, Y and Z, then someone else pointing out he was, and then tweets get deleted, and so on).

Oddly enough, I didn’t keep the rest. Because I’m not crazy. I screenshotted that one on my phone, because it was quite so scary, and when the tweeter promptly deleted it after lots called him out, I was able to repost it. I took screens of a bunch of others, but deleted them since, because I didn’t really like having them on my phone. And, heck, why would I need them?

GG participants are FURIOUS with me, and have attempted to disprove that I’ve received any abuse at all, via various searches. However, they used Topsy, which only stores a month’s worth, meaning it went back only as far as 12th Sept, after the bulk of the abuse I received had happened. Their search also only included that which had the #gamergate tag in it. This also doesn’t work, as the vast majority of the abuse I received came without it. People would send me a tweet saying whatever, and if I replied, they’d then frantically add in the tag to get back-up. This would then bring dozens more in who were following the tag, also insulting me without the tag, and then themselves only adding it in if I replied pointing out they were incorrect, etc.

The reality is, I spent two weeks receiving extraordinary amounts of unpleasant comments, most of them mild, but unrelenting. It was miserable, my wife saw it all happening and it made her miserable, my friends saw it, people argued with these people at the time – it all happened. It’s important that I maintain this, in the face of an attempt to discredit it.

I want to think through some thoughts about #GamerGate, and try to address the questions/accusations I receive the most often from those who identify as part of the movement. I also want to talk about my personal experience of it.

GamerGate (GG), since its beginnings, has unquestionably been a formless, undirected collection of people with wildly disparate aims and desires. To say, “GG thinks X” is a meaningless statement, since there are those who are participating who only want to know that the games journalism/criticism/coverage they read is not affected by corruption, all the way to those who are sending terrifying death and rape threats to women in the industry, with a wide spectrum between. While there are various attempts at grouping together specific aims or objectives, these again widely vary, from desires to see game sites publicise clear ethical guidelines, to the desire to “destroy” sites that do not adhere to particular standards/styles/beliefs. There are those who wish to see “politics left out of games coverage”, and those who wish to see writers with “SJW agendas” out of work. There are those who fear games themselves will be negatively affected by progressive criticism, and those who wish to scare female developers and writers until they are too afraid to participate in the industry.

Identify the group as one aspect of this, and other aspects will step forward in disappointment/fury/confusion in response to this understanding. It’s intangible. And I believe perhaps its greatest weakness is that it seems to have no idea that it is.

I absolutely believe that there are many who have been part of the million tweets made using this tag who are horrified by the horrendous abuse and criminal attacks that have come from within GG. I know that there are those who identify with GG who have benign aims, and are personally hurt or upset when they see people identifying GG as a misogynist cause, or a cruel, bullying agenda. I appeal to these people to consider whether GG is ever going to be a place that accurately reflects them or their desires.

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