Seriously, good lord. This backlash is ridiculous.

This doesn't sound like Soloway's crucifying anybody. But the sketch has really not aged well once you have gotten to know any trans people.The whole joke was that it is weird and creepy that people don't know whether Pat identifies as a girl or a guy. Considering how so many trans people struggle with gender…

It can be both things.

That ending was legendarily awful though.

I'm really glad she asked you that question since the amount of that stuff that gets quietly internalized as fact is almost inevitable, and all the little chips in the armor can really wear a kid away over the years. She's very fortunate to have a dad who recognizes the importance of not bottlenecking her development…

You're not an idiot for not anticipating the worst in people, and it's not like he was giving off a bunch of red flags of anything sinister. That said, if Griffin lets us down let's just go ahead and start The Purge since we'll know that all goodness in the world is a lie.

What exactly were the allegations? I've only gleaned vague impressions of the drama.

Monsanto, De Beers… there are really a lot of highly competitive candidates for Most Evil.

For whatever it's worth I appreciate your passion on the subject. As a woman I've been having variations of this debate as far back as the playground and it gets too exhausting to even bother challenging it every time. It's really heartening to see men who don't let it slide unchallenged even when women aren't weren't…

What!! I am learning this just now. I just dropped everybody's shit on the ground in front of me immediately after looking at it and made the whole house a big mess with intimate letters and hidden booze lying in the middle of the floor.

The voice overs definitely seemed like a conciliation for gamers who need story handed to them, but the voice acting was excellent and combined with the music, I thought they did a nice job punctuating the tone and reigning everything into a clear story progression. If it weren't for Sam's story clearly advancing…

Even the Tacoma article from a few days ago got the requisite "people only care about Gone Home because lesbians" troll comment, so jackassery is still an issue. And gamergaters were around and whining about their clubhouse being invaded by the Wrong Kind of Games made for the Wrong Kind of Gamers long before the…

The follow-up response is why "walking simulators" is an unhelpful descriptor. Nobody purchases and enjoys these games because we wanted to simulate walking, so saying "I don't like walking simulators" sounds like an escalation of the debate with dismissiveness even when you don't mean it as such. The term and the…

I comment on my thoughts of the effectiveness of the spookiness above, but my one problem with the way Gone Home is told is that the voice over bits should happen in order, but you are just as likely to start your exploration by heading up the stairs as by heading down a hall. Maybe it would have benefited from more…

The house -was- haunted though, either literally or metaphorically. The ghost (or "ghost") was exorcised before you got there. And I think the scary first impression of the house was effective in how it gradually became less frightening and more warm as you go along turning on lights and getting to know the family …

The payoff for me was the fact that Sam was alive, Dad had overcome his writers' block (and maybe was making peace with his trauma?) and he and Mom were working on their marriage. Entering their attic full of tokens of Sam and Lonnie's love was a very quiet climax, but a satisfying one for me. The music and pictures…

I think "environmental narrative" works best, since sometimes it's a story told with a ransacked bedroom or the placement of a lonely toy just as much as it's a story told verbally. The emphasis isn't on interaction as much as observation, investigation and comprehension. Visual novels are almost entirely dependent on…

It makes more sense than having conversations with an unusually emotive tiger.

The feeling when it all clicked in place was a very strange mix of horror and elation at how well-executed it was. It made it frustrating to see all the folks over the years who complained that everything important was told to you through voice over.

You got a lot out of it, but I think it is a shame that you seem to have overlooked the fact that the dad had been molested by the uncle who bequeathed him the house. There are hints that the house was actually haunted, though whether it was by an actual spirit or just by the trauma the uncle inflicted on the father…