Thorns

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History A flawed but still interesting critique of John Stewart. This came up on my dash shortly after a discussion of how not-that-feminist Jane Austen was, and I think in both cases there's that ambiguity between satire for it's own sake and political statement. Critiquing hypocrisy and ridiculousness does not always extend to critiquing the system that allows such hypocrisy and ridiculousness to flourish, or those who are sensible and honest but harmful.

Mass Effect: Conviction Comic about the new crew member James Vega. And oh look, after the recent DLC where you had no choice but to destroy a planet of unfriendly aliens(*) we have yet another scene of a privileged guy berating thuggish aliens for being so belligerent about his complicity in the mass murder of their people. YAY.

A nice collection of links about this #yesgayya thing.

Also, I have no link to hand, but Australia now allows for a third gender on passports, and has removed the surgery requirement for trans people, huzzah!

(*)Making this the fourth time the player has to decide if (or in what way) they want to be complicit in genocide/mass murder. I would like a new moral dilemma please.

So, last week I played Mass Effect and loved it, modulo a few niggles (see these posts). I've been playing Mass Effect 2, and while in a lot of ways it's a better game it's gone for Darker and Edgier and has taken some of the problematic aspects of the old game and crossed the line into creepy badness. I'm still definitely going to finish it, but there's that element of "Why can't I quit you/how long until you upset me again" fear that is, for example, familiar to many fans of Supernatural.

Warning: contains sexual assault triggers (though very vague ones) and also spoilers (though the first section isn't spoilery, and the spoilery section is marked)

EDIT: I played it some more and the next few hours of gameplay were pretty much solid awesome. Stupid Bioware.
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