It looks like I had an indirect stroke of luck. My previous monster notebook failed on me in January, so I sprung for a new one to be my main desktop computer. And I was able to get it with Win 7 installed. Looks like I dodged the Win 8 bullet. It's been a long time since Microsoft has made a misjudgement this poor.

It'll be quite a while before I need another new computer, and I assume by that point this will all be straightened out. Word is that the sales rate for new PCs has dropped considerably, and a lot of people in the industry are blaming Microsoft for that. I imagine that a lot of computer manufacturers will be retreating to Win 7, until Microsoft can issue an "update" that makes it possible to not use that abortion of a new user interface.

(I've heard that the head of the Windows division was canned last fall just after the Win 8 release. Looks like he deserved it.)

This Penny Arcade is funny, and well drawn as usual. And the point it makes is a good one. But I'd like to point out that there really are women who are built like that. Most of them have health problems as a result; it isn't by any stretch of the imagination "normal". But they do really exist. There's never been a man like that, though.

There was a Russian girl who was a favorite of certain men's magazines maybe 15 years ago, named something like Julia Ivanovna, whose breasts were considerably larger than the one in that comic. No human physical feature naturally varies as much in size as women's breasts.

A lot of the women who pose for men's "Big 'uns" magazines use the money for breast reduction surgery, I've heard. Can't say I blame them, but it's nicely ironic. And it seems a shame. But then, it's easy for me to say that because I'm not the one having to haul those things around all day.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 03:31 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
Post contains 343 words, total size 2 kb.

1 On the completely unrelated note, Dell is shipping a Windows 8 tablet (NOT Windows RT - real Windows). I thought your HP 500 was the last of the kind, forever, but apparently not! It's heavy like all get out though - 1.43 pounds.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 24, 2013 03:39 PM (RqRa5)

2 I'm having some small amount of difficulties with my graphics card in my desktop.  She's a wonderful system, but it's getting harder and harder to replace things like that, simply because she's seven years old.  I was beginning to look at replacing her, but because of the whole Win8 fiasco, if she fails altogether I'll just shift to my laptop for a while. 

Yulia Nova.

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 24, 2013 03:43 PM (9jITs)

3 My Slate 500 is ample proof that Win 7 just isn't cut out for touchpad machines. It's pretty much unusable without a mouse. (Fortunately they included a USB port, and two more in the charging stand.)

I can understand that Microsoft needed to have a competitive entry for that market. It's obviously the Next Big Thing.

But they should have forked. It was a titanic miscalculation to try to force that new GUI back onto regular PCs.

(I know why they didn't. If they fork the OS, they also fork the app market, and they don't want to do that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 24, 2013 04:31 PM (+rSRq)

4 A confined sub-set for the table-top version of Windows would have been less of a problem.

Which is also kind of hilarious they wouldn't do that for Windows if you know what they've been up to with .NET for all these years.

Posted by: sqa at April 24, 2013 07:07 PM (dvTNf)

5 If they'd simply included the same functionality and configuration settings provided by Start8, there would be almost zero fuss.  The swish Aero Glass has been replaced with a minimalist Flat UI, but they've improved actual functionality in a number of places, so it's not a bad tradeoff.

Their mistake was deciding that what was good for Microsoft - i.e. leveraging their huge install base to tackle the tablet and smartphone market - was more important than what their customers actually wanted.  Technically it would be easy for them to fix Windows 8.  I doubt they will, because that's not how large corporations work.

Oh, and Wonderduck - nice way to bury the lede.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 24, 2013 08:52 PM (PiXy!)

6 J-list sells some Yulia Nova DVDs and photobooks (NSFW).

Posted by: muon at April 25, 2013 01:22 AM (jFJid)

7 It's true that there are very busty women in the real world, but Gabe's joke is also about her snapped spine, missing internal organs, and other Escher Girls anatomy. Yulia Nova isn't particularly pretty, IMHO, but at least her boobs come attached to a shapely human body, and aren't filled with helium. She had her own little section in the video stores I went into in Kyoto and Osaka; there were asian and western models who were bigger, but as is so often the case, the more they selected for size, the less attractive the rest of the model was.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 25, 2013 08:49 AM (+cEg2)

8

It seems this is what they were talking about:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 26, 2013 08:24 AM (+rSRq)

9 That one, but also the Amazon from the same game, albeit for different reasons.

Personally, I think its misguided.  While there is definitely a big problem with sexism and misogyny in video games, this is a poor choice of games to take a stand against.  As near as anyone can tell, its *only* crime is extremely stylized artwork, and amusing-but-misguided webcomic commentary aside, its about equal in how it portrays the male and female characters.  Yes, yes, distinction between power fantasy and sex fantasy artwork. . . except that both the Wizard and ( to a lesser extent ) the Fighter use bishounen art tropes, which are at least as much sex fantasy for women as half-naked women are sex fantasy for men.

Basically, trying to draw more than a really weak and superficial gender aesop from this game seems to be pointless, and if you really want to fight sexism, there are much, much better games to target.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 26, 2013 10:20 AM (3GCAl)

10 Nice use of "definitely". The science is settled.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 26, 2013 10:43 AM (RqRa5)

11 I stand by my judgement.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 26, 2013 10:45 AM (3GCAl)

12 Metaphysician, I see one big difference when I look at their web site: the male characters are fighting, the females are posing. I saw only one non-pinup pose of a female PC. So, while the wizard is drawn as a bishie, he's still more male power fantasy than female eye candy; the sorceress is just pandering ("no, bigger!").

There's nothing wrong with pandering to a well-defined demographic, but it excludes a lot of people who might otherwise buy your stuff, and that group is getting more vocal about it.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 26, 2013 01:20 PM (fpXGN)

13 @10 Pete, are you really suggesting that there ISN'T a problem?  Really? Let me get my popcorn, I'm gonna want to hear this one...

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 26, 2013 05:39 PM (9jITs)

14 #12-

Oh, I don't disagree that there are issues with the game's art.  It almost certainly is pandering.  I just think it is a really poor choice of games to focus on.  To name some examples:

1.  The Soul Calibur fighting game series has female character models that are, relative to the art style of the game and the design of the male characters, much much worse. . . and has a literal observable trend where female characters get bigger boobs and skimpier costumes from one game to another.

2.  Metroid Other M.  The artwork has issues, but is almost completely irrelevant next to the plot, which glorifies a relationship that cannot be described in any way but "codependent and physically abusive."  And it does this to a character who is one of the earliest female icons of gaming.

3.  The extremely toxic fighting game community, where casual misogyny is almost universal.  You could likely substitute "DOTA" and "FPS" in there and have the sentence be just as meaningful.

Next to that, some questionable artwork from a company whose prior games have a reasonably positive track record, vis a vis sexism, doesn't really inspire offense.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 26, 2013 06:19 PM (3GCAl)

15 In the Tomb Raider series, Lara Croft's breasts got bigger in each successive game -- until the last one, where they shrunk about half.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 26, 2013 06:33 PM (+rSRq)

16 "a company whose prior games have a reasonably positive track record, vis a vis sexism" ...is a company that might still be persuadable. I don't think anyone expects the creators of the DoA franchise to abandon years of ever-increasing titty action, any more than they expect Rob Liefeld to suddenly start studying human anatomy.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at April 26, 2013 08:18 PM (+cEg2)

17 But Laura Croft was always facing the wrong way to see them.

They also gained in vertexes, but nobody complained about that.

Posted by: Mauser at April 27, 2013 12:06 AM (cZPoz)

18 Lara Croft is a bit of an odd case.  Her artwork definitely had elements of objectification, especially the growing bra size.  OTOH, that was pretty much restricted to the artwork.  The game otherwise was good, in that it had her clearly as the hero of the game, with full and proper agency.

One of the big concerns of the reboot/prequel Tomb Raider game of late was that it attempts to make a "realistic Lara Croft origin story" filled with traumatic events.  Implicit in this is the deeply sexist notion that female heroes need *justification*.  You can't be an adventurer because you want to adventure, you need some horrible event that breaks you inside. . . because normal, healthy women don't want to be tomb raiders.  On top of being an egregious double standard, it also strips a female hero of agency, in that now their hero-doing is no longer a choice, but a reaction.  Its a subtle, but pernicious, manifestation of "Men Act, Women Are."

As for whether that worry manifested in the final game?  People are divided.  The general reaction is that "most elements were not as bad as feared, but undertones were present and the game felt weird in other ways."  Most of the fans seem to want the franchise to just move past the origin story reboot and go back to playing Lara as Lara.  Maybe not the best outcome, but at least its not Other M. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at April 27, 2013 12:12 PM (3GCAl)

Hide Comments | Add Comment