Dave I/O

STOP THE PRESSES

Though I’m fully aware that it makes me a tragic human being, I play EVE Online, having moved to it from World of Warcraft after hitting the level cap there and finding nothing else to do – unless, of course, I started talking, interacting, and then raiding with people I didn’t know to start with. Because I’m an antisocial bastard sometimes, this didn’t appeal.

Fortunately, a few years ago, a friend of mine told me about EVE. She told me that it was an MMORPG for grown-ups, with a far more open world, an older playerbase that managed to keep the clarity that it was essentially a game about internet spaceships, and generally a more interesting and rewarding experience. I gave CCP, the EVE developers, a bit of money, and created my character. I then proceeded to get hopelessly hooked on a game that was playable in any mood, whether you just wanted to do some sedate mining and chatting, explore and learn about the backstory the sights to be seen, or run around space blowing stuff up.

She was absolutely right about the majority of the playerbase. This isn’t a game for teenagers with ADHD. It’s fast-paced in the microcosm but slow-paced in the grand scheme of things, unforgiving of short-term failure, and exceptionally deep. People were pleasant. Even when combative, in a world where the loss of a ship has significant consequences, you’ll almost always see “GF” in local chat, from both sides, when a player vs. player battle finishes – meaning “good fight”. It’s a game about internet spaceships. Everyone remembers that.

What EVE does have in common with WoW, however, is unremitting chauvinism.

If you have a female avatar, you can expect nonstop trash talk about your menstrual cycle. If you demonstrate that you are in fact female outside of a combat situation, you will be unable to interact as a player for all the clunkily catapulted flirting that is launched in your general direction.

Great example: I listen to EVE Radio, and pay a premium subscription, because it’s genuinely brilliant. Fantastic range of DJs playing a fantastic range of music, with intelligent discussion about stuff both in-game and in the real world, and organised events.

Tonight, a female DJ came on, and the in-game EVE Radio channel devolved into a disgusting mess of testosterone and pseudo-adolescent lust. Let’s look at some of the ‘intelligent discourse’ that DJ Violent Cupcake ended up getting. Player names are redacted because it feels like the right thing to do.

And my personal favourite -

Stay classy, EVE Online. Now, I know that this is just one situation, but I’ve seen stuff like this happening in local chat all over the EVE universe, and the same holds true for my time playing World of Warcraft. Gendered comments are used to smack talk or flirt when someone believes a player to be female, but there’s no gendered language between males.

Female players can be one of two things: the false stereotype of the unskilled female player, or ‘hot’, ‘sexy’ or ‘fit’ because they play a mostly male-dominated game. What it seems that they can’t be is skilled players in their own right, where gender is an irrelevance.

I know that I’m sounding humourless about this, but I genuinely think there’s nothing funny about pushing someone out of a group that they want to contribute to and be part of simply because of their gender.

Am I on the money here? Do you play WoW, EVE or another MMORPG and see or experience what I’m talking about, or am I just frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time and oversensitive to gender inequality? I’d love to hear from you, lovely readership. Pop a comment in below if you’ve got opinions on this one.

Click the image for the original at DeviantART. Slightly NSFW for tiny drawn nipples, if you care.

I discovered the fantastic image to the right, by ‘shiniez’ on DeviantART, while trawling for artists the other day. His work is amazing. The guy’s playful, imaginative and – let’s be honest here, it’s important and surprisingly rare in fetish art – can actually draw.

Topping is an extremely rewarding activity, but it takes a lot out of you. Sure, you can improvise what you have planned for your willing bottom on the spot, but more often than not it ends up being disconnected and cliché, and you run the risk of missing something from a safety perspective. I’m a great proponent of thinking what you’re going to do through before you do it.

It lets you address safety concerns while still maintaining the illusion of danger or peril – and if your scene isn’t heavily based around illusion, you need to think very carefully about how you’re playing.

Anyway, enjoy the image, check out the rest of the guy’s work, and don’t be on fire.

Here I am. I’m British, my lower lip keeps moving oddly to one side and I want to talk to you about an American initiative to destabilise the basic functions of the Internet, so that music labels can make more money.

You can do something about this, regardless of whether you live in the United States or not. Hit http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa for a prettier video with more technical detail, and details on how to contact your representative with your thoughts about SOPA and PROTECT-IP. If you’re a US citizen, get in touch with them. If you’re not, spread the word. SOPA and PROTECT-IP will affect all of us – for the worse – sooner or later.

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that there is a significant likelihood that Private B. Manning is a transgender woman. Taken from a chat log published by Wired magazine between Manning and Adrian Lamo:

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy…”

As such, I have removed the photo that was previously included in this article, altered my pronouns and removed all mention of Manning’s name at birth where possible (unfortunately, the permalink can’t be changed). If this turns out to be untrue, I hope people realise that I don’t believe that accusing someone of being transgender is in any way a smear. One can be a saint or an arsehole, and one’s gender has nothing to do with it.

Thanks for reading, it’s important. Anyway, here’s what you came for.

Private Manning, as you’re probably aware, is currently on trial, charged with about fifteen bazillion counts of generalised ‘being inconvenient’. What it comes down to is the fact that the US military believes that while a Private in the US Army, she passed information to WikiLeaks which was subsequently made available to the public. This information allegedly includes a video of a US Apache helicopter attacking civilians, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables ranging from non-classified to top secret status.

I want to make one thing clear: this article is not about Manning’s guilt or innocence, or the rights or wrongs of what she is accused of doing. That’s been covered elsewhere by people more informed than I am; you can form your own opinion on the matter. This article is about some didactically valuable flaws in her attempts to maintain privacy and security, regardless of whether those attempts were in favour of the US military in her role as an analyst, or to cover her tracks as a whistleblower.

Manning made a few crucial errors that allowed the court access to a fairly large base of evidence that would otherwise have been inaccessible, as it would have been encrypted or obliterated. Unlike the UK, the United States has no mandatory key disclosure law, since the Fifth Amendment allows citizens the right to refrain from acting in a manner that might stand to incriminate themselves. As such, if you encrypt something and you choose not to reveal the key, US law provides no mechanism to coerce you into handing it over.

Other than waterboarding and the bore-worms, anyway.

This is about more than just how one person screwed up, though. Look at the Arab Spring – the Internet, and technology in general, was key to those uprisings. The credit goes to the people, of course, rather than Twitter – but without today’s communication technologies, it would have been much more difficult for them to achieve the numbers and degree of organisation required to make a difference.

I’ve taken a lot of this information from the excellent write-ups of the court sessions posted by bradleymanning.org. You can read them yourself if you’re interested in how the case is going – Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

Alright, I’ll stop wittering and get down to it. After the jump are a few things Manning got wrong, and how to avoid them if you ever need to do something on the quiet.

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