Yikes, I can't imagine that. My school was smart enough to keep the noisy printers off in a separate room where they couldn't really be heard. Unfortunately, dumb enough that when I say "separate room" I usually also mean "separate building...half a mile away...uphill."

The best was when there were entire computer labs of Model Ms...such gorgeous cacophany

Man this thing is drawing some invalid conclusions. Gotta love these digested tertiary sources.

Repeatedly, the reaction I seem to see from a number of gamers seems to me to translate to something like, "Hey!! That lady wrote that we're treating women like f-in' skanks! That's not true! I've never treated women gamers like f-in' skanks! I've never seen anyone do it either! I can't believe she'd claim something like that...God, what an F-in' skank!"

Obviously, the problems of misogyny is far from being on the part of all gamers, or all male-gamers. It is a pretty small minority of the video game playing community as a whole. Unfortunately, it is, at times, also an extremely loud minority. It absolutely sucks to be made to acknowledge it, and it sucks to be "preached at" about it; particularly when you aren't an offender. And when things are written in a tone that makes it feel like it is the majority, and that you are being wrongfully accused of such offenses, it feels hurtful and can possibly even evoke some feelings of hostility. For some of these authors writing about feminism, it very well could be that addressing the problems with different wordings, different tone, different angles could turn out to be more effective at causing positive change and less polarizing. It's a difficult topic to write on, and I'm not going to fault authors for having less than perfect skills in rhetoric. The important thing is that the misogyny is a serious problem that unfortunately does need attention, and the tolerance for it in any form seriously does need to stop. Go back to reading your gaming journalism, and go back to playing your games. The message of equality isn't a very long one and isn't all that distracting from your entertainment.

At least in the US, If you go to the police with an anonymous threat of rape or death from a random stranger on the Internet, the response is, "what exactly would you like us to do about it?". They can't put out a restraining order on a person without a positive identification. They can't exactly assign her a personal armed patrol. The police can't act without something solid. Until then, the victim of such threats is forced to just live with their fears and see if the threats turn out to be credible or not.

At best, you can go to the site/service they used to send the message and get the account banned and the messages removed. But it only takes a moment to set up another account to replace it.

I've personally witnessed a host of comments from people voicing what horrible and violent things they'd like to see happen to Zoey. I've seen multiple postings of links to her copyrighted nude photos. I haven't seen her address, but I have seen evidence of deleted messages on various boards with the indication that it was deleted due to sharing personally identifiable information. According to multiple sources, even the link that Adam Baldwin tweeted originally contained her address.

If you make it known you are a woman on an entire host of mic'd online-play games, you will almost always be harassed. The girls I know who are into those type of games only play them with the mic muted and using an androgynous user-name. More often, they will just stay away from those games, and stick to games that have a less negative social aspect. Similarly, you can easily get called the entire gamut of racial slurs and have your sexual preferences questioned and insulted. It might be true that most of the worst verbal assaults come from dorky 14 year olds, but that doesn't make it alright and that does very little to soften the pain it causes to be treated that way.

It's easy to miss this stuff going on if you don't frequent some of the cruder parts of the Internet, and there is often a strong instinct to want to deny that this sort of thing is happening. But that doesn't make the problems go away.

The problems is that there are two sides to the story. And it's difficult to find sources that will decently explain both of them. One side claims that Zoe faked everything and slept with lots of people to get good reviews and get mods of all sorts of websites to censor anything negative said about her. It is likely true that she was involved with at least one person in the review industry, but not expressly for the purpose of getting good reviews.

The other side claims that it is the result of an ex-boyfriend doing his best to vilify her which caused a decent sized chunk of the gamer community to believe it was now alright to treat to woman like garbage. People, often using spambots, have posted her home address on countless websites (the real reason for most of the moderator censoring), and posted copyrighted nude images of her. She received a number of (idle) threats of rape and violence, and thousands of people on message boards and such started calling her just about every negative term I've ever heard used against a person.

Anti-zoe people were hurt because she became the target both for the reasons why the game review industry is so horrible (who hasn't purchased at least one shitty game do to inaccurate, overly positive reviews?), and the representation of every woman that ever hurt them personally. A large number of guys are drawn to gaming because they are not too good at interacting with women. For a subset of these guys, these problems with interaction have lead to bitter misogyny. In a number of threads and articles, a number of these guys have attacked anyone trying to defend her, claiming that those people either were currently sleeping with zoe, hope/wish that defending her will let them get to sleep with her, or they are loser-white-knights and Social Justice Warrior bitches who need to fuck off and leave us true gamers alone.

So yeah, it's a mess, and this bitter subset has gone and made the gamer community look really bad.

Perfection. I'm now considering this as a perfectly cromulent term. I look forward to using it in conversation.

Except for states that have stringent gunsmithing laws...

Why did Microsoft skip Windows 5 and 6?

They mention this on an episode of How It's Made (or possibly a similar show, I can't recall). When caffeine is extracted from coffee, the solvents are boiled away and the remaining caffeine citrate is sold to soda companies and caffeine pill manufacturers. Decaffeinating coffee is the primary source of pure caffeine these days.

back when I worked as a pharmacy tech, they had a rather large opened jar of pure caffeine citrate powder in the back. Apparently it was used to make a compound of some sort. I was frequently tempted to see what would happen if I just dumped a spoonful of it into my coffee. My sense of responsibility and common sense kept me from trying, and that's probably a good thing.

People getting death and rape threats are victims. People having their home address posted publicly with encouragement to harass them are victims. That's what Zoe has had to deal with, and no matter what she's done, short of genocide, no one deserves this kind of treatment.

It is absolutely true that the game reviewing industry is a complete mess. But having to search a little harder for honest reviews for games does not compare.

The Reddit censoring was because people kept posting links with her home address. That's all that was to it. Admins have to delete that stuff. It is Reddit's #1 rule, and just makes good sense for legal reasons. If people are constantly making new accounts and throwing up links faster than they can delete them, then the only solution is lock the thread (all new comments get auto-deleted) or delete the entire post. Not understanding this, people took it to be evidence of some great conspiracy.

The reddit deletions were happening because they locked the thread, but people continued posting to it as a joke to see how high the number would go. In reddit, when you lock a thread, all it really does is sets an automoderator to immediately delete all new comments. The admins locked the thread because too many people were posting links containing Zoe's address, which is in violation of Reddit's #1 rule.

The people demonizing her are doing so by contacting her directly, and noting that they are going to rape her or kill her. Or posting her home address. Or posting her nude photographs in violation of copyright, or demonizing her in the comments of these articles, or on discussion boards. I've read lots of really vicious comments about what people think of her. And anyone who tries to defend her gets ridiculed as being a loser white knight, probably only defending her in hopes of hooking up with her.

All the deleting I saw was due to people spamming links that included Zoe's personal information, such as her home address. It wasn't a vast conspiracy, it was just attempts to protect privacy.

And the articles themselves might not have attacked her because she's a woman, but lots and lots of assholes were indeed attacking her in a misogynist manner; e.g. rape-threats.