Recently, I was going through my usual wekday routine of watching videos in between job application and such, and I was watching for a second time, the Zero Punctation review of “Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons” and “Papers Please” (both fairly good indie games on XBLA and Steam/GOG/HumbleStore, respectively). During the re-watch, I noticed how one parts of the interview of the former of these two games was changed from…
I’m not gay, I only suck off pre-op transsexuals.
..to..
I’m not gay, I only suck off pantomime dames.
…despite none of the visuals being obviously changed
I also noticed how much of a furor there was about the subject from transsexuals and corresponding rights groups about alleged transsexual bashing in the review, and that it should have been more politically correct in the first place.
I am a gay furry. I also live in southeast Texas, which is a generally conservative, fairly family-oriented place, and one of several places in the US where being and open homosexual carries the same result as walking around with a sign saying, “I molested your seven year-old child, please viciously curb-stomp my ass.”, despite the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act in 2009. One of the main things I do to deal with the stress of being a closeted-off-the-internet gay furry in one of the most conservative areas in the US is be as politically incorrect as I can get away with. I say that things are “so gay”, I use the terms “faggot”, “butch”, “queer”, “homo”, “dyke”, “fag”, “tranny”, and other such slurs regularly. I used to feel upset at myself, but now I do not feel shame about it, mainly because most of the non-white people I know use slurs in their daily speech between themselves. I’ve seen and heard numerous instances of two black people at the local Walmart using the N-word in their conversations, and I came to the resolution long ago that as long as blacks and other minorities use slurs among themselves, I would continue to use these slurs and I would actively encourage gays I know to just let it the hell go.
That goes ditto for the furor over the aforementioned review.
Moving on…
A while back, you noticed my blog stopped updating to its various social media services for a time. This was because of a botnet stemming from several thousand IP addresses in Asia going after installations of WordPress to get login credentials. In an effort to stem the tide, my web host decided to create a system-wide block of all access to all wp-login.php files hosted on his service, via an Apache Basic Authentication login. Unfortunately, the block was put in place without anyone hosting a WordPress blog on his service being given warning, so I had zero notice of what happened until emailing him complaining. As far as I know, the block is going to stay in place until he is satisfied that the botnet has moved on, but I have zero intention of waiting. The only saving grace that is keeping BiafraRepublic.ME here is that the block mentioned above is override-able in .htaccess, so I punched holes through for several major ISPs in the US, as well as for Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com. Hopefully, service will be restored to these mirrors. Granted my host does not recommend this, believing that anything that goes through wp-login.php (read, almost every WordPress plugin there is) is doing it wrong, but unfortunately, I also believe that springing a block to defend against a real threat without at least sending a system-wide email is even more wrong.
So, tl;dr…
- I liked the original ZP video review better
- I am a politically incorrect twat and a RL-closeted gay furry
- Webhost needs to learn to communicate with his users, rather than fix and answer complaints later.