(Nearly) Open Thread, September 5 2012

TBAT would like to thank everyone for their thoughtful and civil participation in the atheist roundtable discussion. We hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

We'd like to see more such discussions in the future, but the way to kick them off is to have interesting pieces to publish. Submit some work, people!

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[Nenya]

Should I shoot you another email about the article about deafness I asked you about earlier in the month? I know y'all are busy.

[The Board Administration Team]

@Nenya: Just emailed you. :)

[Ross]

Wanted to boost the signal on this: "Poor is when every cent you earn goes to [rent], not to a gamble disguised as an investment."

It's an article about economic disparity in the gaming community. Quick precis: Steam introduced a indie game submission system that charges a $100 fee for submissions in an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff (A huge problem with indie-game submission services is that they quickly become a ghetto full of unplayable games, troll submissions, offensive games, or dual joystick zombie shooters, with the effect that a good indie game generally won't get a second look because "everyone knows' that there's nothing in the indie game section but crap). The fee goes to charity, so it's not about making money for Valve. Some developers gottogether and sent an open letter saying, roughly, that a lot of them can't actually spare a hundred dollars because they are not yet successful game producers (and pointed out that if you're a rich kid who wants to submit a troll game, a hundred dollar fee won't stop you).

The response, from other developers, valve, the industry press, and a lot of everyone else, was "How could anyone not be able to afford a hundred dollars? If you need a hundred dollars, why not just skip going out clubbing one night; that's what I do when Ineed an extra hundred dollars."

So yeah. The unexamined privilege, it burns:

A disappointingly large number of developers and journalists could not even imagine that some people don’t have this amount of money. I found this genuinely shocking. It’s not that they hadn’t experienced it themselves, but that they could not even conceive of it. That’s a disconnection from reality so fundamental that it is quite frightening. Ever wonder why there aren’t more political games? This is why. Not only are the majority of developers (those who have a voice, anyway) white heterosexual middle-class males from the US or the UK, but a scary amount of them have absolutely no understanding of the existence of anything outside their own experience, and are in fact offended by the very suggestion that anything else exists.

[Leum]

Ross, that's pretty mind-blowing. Both in the privilege blindness and, to me, the idea of spending $100 on a night out being a regular enough occurrence that not doing it was an easy way to have an extra Franklin. I come from a wealthy family (I'm guessing at least top 10%), I have quite a large nest egg saved up, and I can't conceive of spending that much money on a night out, and if I did, it wouldn't be anything like a regular event.

It's not my thing, but I can understand having maybe a blow-out night every few months where you spend that kind of dough, and if you have a family even a night out at a relatively inexpensive place can add up pretty quickly, but clubbing isn't a family sort of thing.

*Leum wanders off mumbling to himself*

[cjmr]

If you need a babysitter, $100 is now dinner and a movie--assuming $15-20 per person per meal (which is TGI Friday's/Applebee's, not a proper restaurant) and popcorn and drinks at the movie.

At least partly because of this, we haven't done dinner and a movie in YEARS.

[Anonymus]

*boggles too*

My experiences of clubbing have never been anywhere near that expensive. Get there at 11:57pm so that you don't have to pay the entrance fee (to get people there early, the club i'm thinking of lets you in free if you come before midnight). Then pay 50 cents for them to store your coat. Then if you're really, really, really thirsty then maybe blow a couple dollars on a coca cola...

Granted, I haven't been in a couple years. They might charge a dollar now for storing your coat...

[cjmr]

TBAT, I think I have a post caught in the spam trap.

[The Board Administration Team]

@cjmr: Found you and freed you.

[Nenya]

Dear God, that's astounding, about the gaming. A hundred dollars is a lot of money.

TBAT: Thanks, got your email! Will pass along the answer when I have it! <3

[Leum]

If you need a babysitter, $100 is now dinner and a movie--assuming $15-20 per person per meal (which is TGI Friday's/Applebee's, not a proper restaurant) and popcorn and drinks at the movie.

Anchorage's usually a fairly pricey city, but you can get a really good meal here for $10 (well, not counting tip). Having a soda or a dessert can push it up, of course, but this is a really nice blessing to be able to count.

[Lonespark]

Yeah, we only do movies, no dinner, and that's when we can get free grandparent sitters.

[kisekileia]

Those developers and journalists clearly haven't looked at the actual poverty numbers in the U.S. right now. 1/6 of the population is below the poverty line, which is staggeringly low--$23,000/year for a family of four, and $10,500/year for a single person. That's a LOT of people who just do not have $100, even for a really important career opportunity. I hate that poor people are so invisible in North American society that most people in the U.S. have no idea that 1/6 of their fellow Americans live in poverty this deep.

TBAT, I hope the atheist roundtable wasn't too much hassle to moderate. I didn't see any troll comments, but I don't know whether there really have been fewer of them lately or whether you were just working extra hard to keep them from showing up. Thank you for making sure we didn't see however many there were.

[Lonespark]

Spending money on career stuff is pretty much always totally worth it. You have to act like, dress like, etc. a person who has the job you want. But being worth it is irrelevant when you don't have it, can't borrow it, need it to feed your kids. AAARRGH.

[Ross]

A hundred dollars would probaably be on the steep side for an evening out now, typically for me and my wife, it's closer to $40-$50, though we don't do movies often. Much more if we had to get a sitter I assume.

But a hundred dollars does sound about right for "night out clubbing" from when I was in college. It wasn't something I did often, but I certainly knew people who did it every single week, and I knew people who did it twice a week, and I even knew people who did it four or five times a week(We called them "Business majors").

[Ross]

I think (and more sort of hope) that part of the problem is that indie game publishing falls into a somewhat nebulous area around "entrepreneurial endeavor". A hundred dollars *isn't* a lot of money for a start-up internet business to invest in something. And even though this really *isn't* the same thing, there's enough overlap that it fouls the expectations, and you end up with people forming a false-partial-equivalence between releasing an indie game and, say, starting your own small business.

[cjmr]

A sitter, here, for a whole evening, is ~$30 for three kids, and movie tickets are $11 apiece.

Tonight I'm going to go cook dinner for and watch my BFF's six kids so she and her husband can go out to dinner for their 21st wedding anniv. They'll reciprocate for our 22nd anniversary in December. (If, unlike the past two years, one set or the other of kids does not have stomach flu in December.)

That's the only way we can afford to go out these days.

[Nick Kiddle]

I've been considering some of the costs involved with starting a business lately, and they do represent a huge barrier, individually as well as collectively, to someone who's starting from absolutely nothing. The hundred-dollar entry fee doesn't seem anything like as bad as all the people saying "Pffft, a hundred bucks is nothing, you could save that up by giving up lattes for a week" or whatever. Barriers to entry are a thing, and unavoidable to a certain extent. People who give advice while oblivious to their privilege are an abomination.

Another thing that infuriated me in the comments to that post were the people saying "Gaming is a luxury. If you can't make your rent, get a proper job." For some people, a "proper job" is out of reach in any economy, let alone this one, and trying to make money out of something you're actually capable of doing or even *gasp* skilled at seems like a perfectly rational approach. And luxuries could actually be more recession-proof than necessities if there's enough oblivious rich people (which anecdotal sampling suggests is the case).

[Lonespark]

The hundred-dollar entry fee doesn't seem anything like as bad as all the people saying "Pffft, a hundred bucks is nothing, you could save that up by giving up lattes for a week" or whatever. Barriers to entry are a thing, and unavoidable to a certain extent. People who give advice while oblivious to their privilege are an abomination.

Yes, yes, a thousand times.

If you can't make your rent, get a proper job.

And meanwhile, the other half of the people you meet, assholes or trying to help, are telling you to try more freelancing and look into starting a business. Not to mention, plenty of people with at least one job can't make the rent and the grocery bill and childcare and...

[anamardoll]

I have a stupid question that was probably answered elsewhere, but I'll ask here instead of bugging the TBATs directly.

1. Are one-off submissions still desirable for publishing here (or are we moving towards a round-table format only)?

2. Have we yet done round-tables on any of the following:

a. Tarot roundtable

b. Women Who Fear / Women Who Don't Fear (I'd love to see -- and contribute -- to something that talked about the issues that came up in the comments here this week: http://www.anamardoll.com/2012/09/twilight-cloudy-with-chance-of-rape.html with an eye towards how women are damned socially if they don't perfectly submit to the threat tolerances of others)

c. More lightheartedly, something like "Literature that changed our childhood" (I think that could be something really fun -- I'd talk about how I kept our school copy of Peter Pan perpetually checked out for 2 years.)

[The Board Administration Team]

:) Ana.

1. Yes, one-off submissions are still quite desirable.

2. None of those roundtables have been done because no one is organizing them. Volunteers are welcome.

Also, submissions for prompts of the day are welcomed.

[anamardoll]

Thank you! I'm really really bad at organizing things, but I'd contribute to all three if someone else was doing the org work.