Hbomberguy's Donkey Kong 64 charity stream.

[NeutralDrow]

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

The backstory is that Hbomberguy did a Youtube video <url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5auJOBC828>about speedrunners a couple months back. One game he brought up was Donkey Kong 64, specifically from his childhood. He mainly used it to discuss the concept of speedrunning being an inherently inclusive hobby (because it's inherently shared, and everyone learns from everyone else's successes and insights) and springboarding into how to count as a "100% completion speedrun" (noting people are still mining and discovering things years later).

He then admitted that he never finished the game as a kid, since he eventually realized it's a difficult, meaninglessly-grindy, repetitive mess. Out of lingering regret, and out of admiration for speedrunners, he promised he would stream himself playing the game straight through to 101% completion, no matter how long it took him.

The rest of the context is in the OP. He decided to make it a charity livestream.

EDIT: I didn't see him use any glitches, but he did abuse savestates during the final boss. It was around hour 54 (and it's a friggin' five-stage boss), so I don't think anyone begrudged him.

54 hours. Was that straight? Not really much of a speedrun though. Should've used more moon kicks.

No, he stopped to eat and sleep, and I think he left to go to the store once to buy tofu for a stretch goal (at 100k, he promised to write SOBEK on his forehead and eat a block of tofu straight).

Jokes about him being a willing sacrifice aside, he had an entire Twitch chat with a vested interest in him staying alive, reminding him to take care of himself.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

The forums have been through some rough times...

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

The forums have been through some rough times...

rough times indeed...I sill remember the Gamergate threads

The bans, The butthurt, So many good users gone...

 

[Drathnoxis]

rough times indeed...I sill remember the Gamergate threads


The bans, The butthurt, So many good users gone...

Man, that hardly even counts as rough times anymore. How about when we had to abandon Gaming Discussion for like 6 months because the spambots completely overwhelmed the mods and took it over? 20+ pages of threads, all spam. Or when feature after feature of the site just started breaking down. No view counters on threads, quote notifications would reset to 'off' every Sunday, and the 'last active' part of the profile page becoming stuck in September 2017.

At least during Gamergate people were active and not spambots trying to sell us fake IDs and black magic love potions.

 

[Terminal Blue]

For those confused about Mermaids and what they do.

Mermaids is a small charity which provides support groups and advice for gender variant (trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming) children and their parents. It also campaigns to promote awareness of gender-variance and gender dysphoria in children.

Gender variance in children is incredibly misunderstood. Even well-meaning parents can be tempted to resort to things like conversion therapy (which still happens even in the UK) and many medical professionals are unclear or ignorant on what best-practice actually is in treating gender-variant kids, leading to a poor standard of care. Being gender-variant as a child or young person can also be extremely socially isolating and often leads to bullying and violence. Many young people in this position attempt suicide.

The charity was due to recieve ?500,000 in lottery funding, and the plan was that most of this money would go into organising local support groups so that young people and their parents can meet in person. This is a great way of combating loneliness and helping children in this position to build their own peer support networks, which in turn helps build psychological resilience. It absolutely wasn't anything sinister and had nothing to do with the medical side of transitioning (which Mermaids isn't involved with).

The ironic thing about Linehan's campaign is how obviously it is based in the same fears about trans children that Mermaids supports parents in actually dealing with. Even if they're not transphobic, most parents generally don't want their children to be trans/gender non-conforming/gay/bisexual because they want their children to have an easy and "normal" life. The idea that most or all gender variant children will "correct" themselves if they are discouraged is tempting, because it offers a promise that such children can be "fixed". However, no study has ever actually measured the long term outcomes for individual gender variant children. Anyone claiming knowledge or citing statistics on this issue is making shit up.

Back on topic, it's incredible that this livestream took off to such a massive degree. For me though, the best part of it was seeing Mermaids CEO Susie Green appear on the BBC and basically be given a platform to explain the charity and what they do without it being structured as a "debate" over whether trans kids exist, which I never would have imagined could happen in the current British media environment. I don't think this is the "turning point" or anything, but it is a big deal.

 

[NeutralDrow]

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

The forums have been through some rough times...

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

Man, that hardly even counts as rough times anymore. How about when we had to abandon Gaming Discussion for like 6 months because the spambots completely overwhelmed the mods and took it over? 20+ pages of threads, all spam. Or when feature after feature of the site just started breaking down. No view counters on threads, quote notifications would reset to 'off' every Sunday, and the 'last active' part of the profile page becoming stuck in September 2017.

At least during Gamergate people were active and not spambots trying to sell us fake IDs and black magic love potions.

rough times indeed...I sill remember the Gamergate threads

The bans, The butthurt, So many good users gone...

I left sometime during or after the tail end of GG, right when the spambot invasions were happening. Saw some talk on Twitter (on a thread about this charity livestream, coincidentally) that things have improved, so I came back.

It's definitely feeling like a refugee homecoming.

Still trying to process the death of the usergroups, honestly. Sure, they were kind of a mistake in retrospect, but still. At least R&P is looking less toxic, and Game Industry Discussion was put out of its misery at some point.

EDIT: Speaking of breakages, have everyone else's avatars disappeared? Or is that just on my end?

 

[NeutralDrow]

Back on topic, it's incredible that this livestream took off to such a massive degree. For me though, the best part of it was seeing Mermaids CEO Susie Green appear on the BBC and basically be given a platform to explain the charity and what they do without it being structured as a "debate" over whether trans kids exist, which I never would have imagined could happen in the current British media environment. I don't think this is the "turning point" or anything, but it is a big deal.

It's giving me a lot of hope, honestly. Like, maybe the recent transphobic stuff in politics and the media really is loud out of desperation rather than size, and maybe T people won't have to relitigate literally everything L and G have already accomplished.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I left sometime during or after the tail end of GG, right when the spambot invasions were happening. Saw some talk on Twitter (on a thread about this charity livestream, coincidentally) that things have improved, so I came back.

It's definitely feeling like a refugee homecoming.

Still trying to process the death of the usergroups, honestly. Sure, they were kind of a mistake in retrospect, but still. At least R&P is looking less toxic, and Game Industry Discussion was put out of its misery at some point.

EDIT: Speaking of breakages, have everyone else's avatars disappeared? Or is that just on my end?

Pitts axed GID when he came back, as well as Biowarriors and the WW (best subforum ;__

You probably need to make sure you have disable avatars set to 'no' in forum options and then you might need to clear your browser's cache too.

 

[NeutralDrow]

I left sometime during or after the tail end of GG, right when the spambot invasions were happening. Saw some talk on Twitter (on a thread about this charity livestream, coincidentally) that things have improved, so I came back.

It's definitely feeling like a refugee homecoming.

Still trying to process the death of the usergroups, honestly. Sure, they were kind of a mistake in retrospect, but still. At least R&P is looking less toxic, and Game Industry Discussion was put out of its misery at some point.

EDIT: Speaking of breakages, have everyone else's avatars disappeared? Or is that just on my end?

Pitts axed GID when he came back, as well as Biowarriors and the WW (best subforum ;__

The last message in Anime Fans was lamenting Wild West being gone...never really used it, myself, but I feel its loss. I actually don't remember what Biowarriors was, though.

You probably need to make sure you have disable avatars set to 'no' in forum options and then you might need to clear your browser's cache too.

Yay, that worked, thank you!

That was another option I didn't realize this forum had. Weird, when I logged in for the first time, I must have still had the avatar images cached, or something. They were there at first, and disappeared suddenly.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I actually don't remember what Biowarriors was, though.

When the Bioware forums shut down the Escapist thought it could scoop up some of that traffic by making them their very own special subforum. It didn't work. I think there was a total of 7 posts in it.

 

[Terminal Blue]

It's giving me a lot of hope, honestly. Like, maybe the recent transphobic stuff in politics and the media really is loud out of desperation rather than size, and maybe T people won't have to relitigate literally everything L and G have already accomplished.

I mean, I think it's definitely loud out of desperation, and it's interesting to see Harry/Hbomb echo a lot of my thoughts in commentary.

Because this whole thing is exactly what happened to gay and lesbian people a couple of decades ago. In the late-80s there was a moral panic that "predatory homosexuals" were "indoctrinating" kids into being gay. Of course, nowadays, if you talk like that about gay people you sound like a crazy person, but at the time it worked. It got a lot of otherwise pretty decent people frightened and confused enough to believe that gay people were after their kids.

Fortunately, we've moved on, but the shitty core of homophobic conservatives who think like that never went away, they've just shifted to talking about trans people as a dog whistle to talk about LGBT people generally, because ultimately they hate everything remotely outside the norm, and because for some reason you can still say that trans people are going to indoctrinate your kids or trans people are going to attack you when you're on the toilet and not sound like a dribbling loon.

It also helps that transphobia is a convenient wedge issue, because a lot of well meaning people (even people who are normally pretty progressive) have been suckered into believing that trans people are a threat to women, or that trans people are going to get rid of all the gays by forcing them to be trans, or that trans people are somehow trivializing the concept of minority rights by talking about identity like it actually matters, and by pitting these groups against each other conservatives feel they can win.

But they can't, and ultimately the same thing is going to happen. The people who were taken in will eventually have to live in a world where trans people exist and are visible and aren't just scary bathroom monsters, and in the course of doing that they'll figure it out. In fact, I think they'll figure it out a lot quicker this time because frankly, we don't have the same degree of media gatekeeping. What the unexpected success of this stream shows, I think, is that many, many people were already there, and were just waiting for an excuse to speak back to how awful the climate has gotten.

 

[Pseudonym]

For those like myself who missed it (I was in airplanes and stuff), HBomberguy uploaded a part of it on his youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mvYUaZYtJk It's the part where Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (the leftwing democratic US congresswoman) shows up.

Man, I'm away for two years, and it's like my profile options have gone through a factory reset? I didn't even know you could turn off quote notifications...

For some period of time this website has had no staff at all. Kross had been fired. It was owned by Defy Media at the time who were content to host Zero Punctuation and to otherwise ignore the escapist alltogether. During that time stuff started breaking and certain options started getting turned on and off without people wanting that. For a while quote notifications became turned off multiple times a week for those who cared to turn it back on all the time.

Somebody, I forget who, bought it from Defy and has done some work (or payed others, including Kross, I believe, to do work) to get the place basically functional again. But anyway, that is probably why your quote notifications are turned off.

 

[Something Amyss]

Looked up that Graham Linehan guy. Apparently he's one of the creators of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. And also quite vocal in his opposition to transgender issues, including at one point comparing transgender activists to nazis [https://metro.co.uk/2018/12/13/father-ted-creator-graham-linehan-compares-trans-activists-nazis-8243867/], among other rather tasteless stuff.

That's really a shame. I like those shows.

[Trans includes cross dressing.

Not generally, no.

He mainly used it to discuss the concept of speedrunning being an inherently inclusive hobby (because it's inherently shared, and everyone learns from everyone else's successes and insights)

That is...the same sort of logic that could be used the argue fandoms are inherently inclusive, which is just plain bullshit. Though to be fair, it's about what I expect from HBomberguy. I've only watched a couple videos on the subject and I'm aware it's not immune to issues of inclusivity.

 

[NeutralDrow]

Somebody, I forget who, bought it from Defy and has done some work (or payed others, including Kross, I believe, to do work) to get the place basically functional again. But anyway, that is probably why your quote notifications are turned off.

Makes sense. Looks like they're randomly turning off for me, still, but I don't mind turning the avatars back on, I suppose.

That is...the same sort of logic that could be used the argue fandoms are inherently inclusive, which is just plain bullshit. Though to be fair, it's about what I expect from HBomberguy. I've only watched a couple videos on the subject and I'm aware it's not immune to issues of inclusivity.

Sorry, "inclusive" was probably the wrong word (he wasn't commenting on tolerance or even necessarily lack of gatekeeping, that I can tell; he's a bizarre optimist, but I don't think he's that naive). "Communal" is closer to what he actually said.

"There's a tremendous sense of community to speedrunning. People share information and discoveries, discuss theories together, and all the tricks used in runs are by their nature immediately available for further analysis and use in other runs.(...)

Speedrunning is an almost inherently collectivist activity in this sense. While there is competition to be the best and take or hold the record, almost no record holder has completely earned that position all on their own. The best runs owe a debt to the ideas and discoveries contributed by previous runners. The best run is often representative of many people's contributions (alongside the runner's own skill, of course). In a sense, speedruns are always a group effort. It's really not surprising that awesome charity events like GDQ have emerged from this space. It's just a grander-scale version of what speedrunning had kind of always been. You can't copyright a technique of beating a video game quickly. There is are no patents in speedrunning. Proving that you got a time, or even getting the fastest time, isn't just an achievement or personal victory. It's also automatically a contribution to the greater community effort. And that's radical. Comradical."

 

[Something Amyss]

Sorry, "inclusive" was probably the wrong word (he wasn't commenting on tolerance or even necessarily lack of gatekeeping, that I can tell; he's a bizarre optimist, but I don't think he's that naive). "Communal" is closer to what he actually said.

"There's a tremendous sense of community to speedrunning. People share information and discoveries, discuss theories together, and all the tricks used in runs are by their nature immediately available for further analysis and use in other runs.(...)

Speedrunning is an almost inherently collectivist activity in this sense. While there is competition to be the best and take or hold the record, almost no record holder has completely earned that position all on their own. The best runs owe a debt to the ideas and discoveries contributed by previous runners. The best run is often representative of many people's contributions (alongside the runner's own skill, of course). In a sense, speedruns are always a group effort. It's really not surprising that awesome charity events like GDQ have emerged from this space. It's just a grander-scale version of what speedrunning had kind of always been. You can't copyright a technique of beating a video game quickly. There is are no patents in speedrunning. Proving that you got a time, or even getting the fastest time, isn't just an achievement or personal victory. It's also automatically a contribution to the greater community effort. And that's radical. Comradical."

I mean, the same criticism still sort of applies. There's an incredible sense of community in the gaming community as a whole until you'r a girl or gay or black ro trans or Muslim. There's the same kind of harassment within the speedrunning community to my understanding, the same "missing stair" issue from other nerd culture, etc.

Watching histories of speedrun records, I've even seen the runners talk about people who hide their strats and keep things secret to the point they're accused of cheating, etc. I mean, I'm not part of this community as I don't have the patience to practice a single game that much, and it's always possible the videos I've watched and threads I've read were all forgeries, but...this still strikes me as an asinine thing to say.

There's always always always a sense of community in these cultures until you're excluded or attacked for some reason.

I should probably cut Htothebomb some slack, because running a speedrun for a trans youth charity is clearly a good thing and his heart is in the right place, but as someone who's tripped over a lot of missing stairs (including within his little circle of friends on YouTube), I'm tired of people in the majority talking about community. They usually have no cle what other people have gone through and so they're not being malicious, but they are often perpetuating the problem by papering over the cracks in their "communities".

 

[Terminal Blue]

I should probably cut Htothebomb some slack, because running a speedrun for a trans youth charity is clearly a good thing and his heart is in the right place, but as someone who's tripped over a lot of missing stairs (including within his little circle of friends on YouTube), I'm tired of people in the majority talking about community.

So, while I'm with you in terms of not tolerating the missing stairs, I do have to raise my eyebrow a bit at the idea that an openly bi person is part of "the majority".

I get it, the B is silent, and for most LGT people being invisible probably sounds great. But we've all been invisible. We did it when we were closeted and it sucked.. so we stopped by coming out. Being closeted is not privilege.

If you want to call out a bi person, make it about something they've actually said or done (it's really not like there's no material here in that regard). Subtly aligning them with the "majority" isn't entirely cool, and it's reminiscent of the kind of "not really queer" language which, for a lot of bi people, is part of the exclusion they face.

No community is perfect. That shouldn't be an excuse for giving up on the idea of community, because in practice that means a kind of free for all where being an ass to each other becomes normal instead of a thing to call out. The imperfection of communities should be an incentive to do better. The irony of the past few years is that while Vivian James' Special Boys Club were claiming to represent Gamers, it was obvious on the ground that the actual gaming community was way more diverse and interesting than they thought it was. The solution to gate-keeping isn't to give up on community, but to break the monopoly gatekeepers think they have on that community.