firehose

The Medialink router that was reviewed.

Mediabridge

Update 5/8/2014 19:44 CT: On Thursday, Mediabridge Products posted an official statement about this incident to its Facebook page, clarifying its position and saying that Amazon has revoked its selling privileges. However, Mediabridge subsequently deleted the statement and its entire Facebook presence after receiving negative comments.

In the statement, the company says that it did not actually sue the Amazon reviewer, but that it did insist that the reviewer's "untrue, damaging, and disparaging statements" be taken down. "It’s our sincere belief that reasonable people understand that not only is it within our rights to take steps to protect our integrity, but that it should be expected that we would do so when it is recklessly attacked," Mediabridge Products wrote. "The reviewer has since changed his review completely to remove the libelous statements, but unfortunately not before having an army attack us on the internet."

The company did not give any clue as to the terms of Amazon's rescinding of Mediabridge's selling license, but only said at the end of its statement, "Unfortunately, as a result of our attempt to get this reviewer to do the right thing & remove his untrue statements about our company, Amazon has revoked our selling privileges. Many hard-working employees whose livelihood depended on that business will likely be put out of a job, by a situation that has been distorted & blown out of proportion."

raindog808

A House committee on Wednesday unanimously voted to end the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata collection program.

The vote by the House Judiciary Committee was 32-0. The measure moves to the full House, where its passage is uncertain.

"Today's strong, bipartisan vote by the House Judiciary Committee takes us one step closer to ending bulk collection once and for all and safeguards Americans’ civil liberties as our intelligence community keeps us safe from foreign enemies who wish us harm," committee lawmakers said in a joint statement.

The second time was the charm for Treachery in Beatdown City: The old-school beat-'em-up was successfully funded on Kickstarter this afternoon to the tune of $50,473 from 1,249 backers.

That total topped developer NuChallenger's goal of $49,000 by 3 percent; the target was reached shortly before the end of the funding drive. NuChallenger had relaunched Treachery in Beatdown City on Kickstarter last month with a revised pitch after its first campaign, which was asking for $50,000, pulled in less than half of that amount.

"Thanks everyone! I am still wrapping my head around this," said studio head Shawn Alexander Allen in a backers-only Kickstarter update posted upon the close of the campaign. "You have all made my dream come true, and we will make Treachery in Beatdown City as good as possible." The game is currently scheduled for release on Mac and Windows PC in February 2015.

For more on the multicultural brawler, check out our interview with Allen about how difficult he found it to turn to Kickstarter in the first place, as well as our coverage of his PAX East 2014 talk about the lack of minority individuals in game development.

Disclosure: The author of this post is a Kickstarter backer of the project.

Nintendo has chosen to remain on the wrong side of history with today’s statement announcing that they will not allow the inclusion of same-sex relationships in the U.S. release of the upcoming game Tomodachi Life.

"Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life. The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation," the statement read. "We hope that all of our fans will see that Tomodachi Life was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary."

I apply a simple principle to statements like these: the more words a company needs to use to justify its exclusionary choices, the more simple its motivations. Call it a queer version of Occam’s razor. Behind all the corporate jargon and flowery public relations language lies hatred, pure and simple.

The beating, bigoted heart of Nintendo’s statement is this: Nintendo does not care about its lesbian, gay, and bisexual audience. But Nintendo’s LGBT audience certainly cares about Tomodachi Life. They went so far as to exploit the game’s Japanese release in order to allow same-sex relationships.

A sentiment as simple as bigotry deserves a condemnation that is just as straightforward. And, indeed, Nintendo is being justly chastised for its exclusionary choice by the games press and social media at large.

Nintendo's staid commitment to cultural conservatism has always been frustratingly at odds with its creative innovation, and fans are no longer able to tolerate the dissonance between the two. Super Mario Galaxy filled me with an irrepressible sense of childlike wonder; today’s statement fills me with bitterness and dread. The company that continues to change the way we play games can’t seem to change the way it thinks about the people who play those games.

But there might be value in thinking like Nintendo, if only to unpack the normative assumptions behind their decision to exclude same-sex relationships from Tomodachi Life. In particular, I want to hone in on three phrases used by Nintendo in today’s statement: "social commentary," "playful alternate world," and "real-life simulation."

"Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life."

Same-sex relationships are not a "social commentary," they are a cultural reality. According to the Pew Research Center, as of last year there were at least 70,000 same-sex marriages in the United States. The number of same-sex relationships in the country, however, far outstrips this figure.

Calling the erasure of this many people a "playful alternate world" is both offensive and scary. To position straight relationships as self-evident while sidelining the actuality of same-sex relationships as "social commentary" is one of the most transparent indicators of heteronormativity at work.

Social theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as "the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent… but also privileged." They add that heterosexuality is allowed to remain "unmarked," that it has an "invisible, tacit, society-founding sense of rightness."

With today’s statement, Nintendo underscores the invisibility of heterosexuality while strategically marking same-sex relationships as visible, political, and abnormal. In a broader cultural sense, Nintendo doesn’t need to justify its exclusions on its own; it can simply leverage the weight of a shared heteronormative worldview that sees same-sex relationships as deviant and other. By dismissing same-sex relationships as "social commentary," Nintendo sits back and lets heteronormativity do the heavy lifting.

"The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world…"

If Tomodachi Life presents the player with an "alternate world," then it needn’t be constrained by the narrow-mindedness of the actual world. This point has been repeatedly made by feminist commentators in the science-fiction and fantasy scenes: history does not have to determine fantasy.

Queer people also know the importance of alternate worlds. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner observe that one of the central practices of queer life is "worldmaking:" creating transient, ephemeral spaces that are kept relatively free from heteronormative influence. Gay bars, bookstores, parades: all of these are "playful alternate worlds" where queer people can be themselves. Video games are fast becoming important sites for queer worldmaking.

By constructing an "alternate world" in Tomodachi Life that explicitly prohibits all but the most normative of relationship structures, Nintendo is foreclosing the value of play and alternate forms of reality for a wide swath of gamers. Exclusion is not playful and more alternate realities should function as safe havens from the bigotry that defines our own reality, not as a way of pretending entire populations of people don’t exist at all.

"…the game represent[s] a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation."

The irony here is that Nintendo is simulating the exclusions of "real-life" all too well. If I were to attempt to create a legally recognized same-sex relationship in Tomodachi Life, I would be met with the same response as I would from the state of Georgia: absolutely not.

Nintendo is certainly simulating real-life with Tomodachi Life; they’re just being selective about which aspects of real-life they simulate. For my part, I won’t get to experience the joy of a simulated relationship with another woman, but I will get to experience a painful simulation of my real-life inability to procure a marriage license.

Complicating Nintendo’s statement is the fact that Tomodachi Life utilizes avatars called Miis that players explicitly design to resemble themselves. The appeal of the game is its approximation of a real-life living situation with whatever fantasies the player brings along for the ride.

Players don’t want to choose between an "alternate world" and a "real-life" one; games like Tomodachi Life are fun precisely because they allow the player to seamlessly blend the two together.

To claim only in the face of anti-homophobic outcry that Tomodachi Life is not intended to be "a real-life simulation" shows us Nintendo at its most cowardly, denying the very premise of the game in order to justify a regressive refusal to reflect both the realities and fantasies of queer existence.

Nintendo made its choice today. And while the words in their statement distill down to the most basic form of hatred, the assumptions that inform that hatred are more troubling still. It’s time for Nintendo to live up to its reputation for innovation and choose differently.

Hyrule Warriors, Tecmo Koei's Dynasty Warriors-like action game set in Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda universe, will be released in Japan for Wii U this summer, according to a Japanese language document (PDF link) from the company. 

Revealed last December in a Nintendo Direct, the third-person action game spinoff will pit Link against armies of Hylian opponents. Hyrule Warriors, the game's working title, doesn't have a Western release window, though we've reached out to Nintendo for more information and will update this article as we receive it. 

Press play below to see a teaser trailer for the game.

At a Wondercon panel last month celebrating Batman’s 75th anniversary, DC Comics’ Larry Ganem answered an audience member’s question about why Bill Finger isn’t credited as the co-creator of Batman by saying, “we’re all good with Finger and his family.”

According to a press release issued by the Comic Arts Council, Finger’s family disagrees. Athena Finger, Bill Finger’s granddaughter, is quoted in the release as saying it’s time to speak up after “75 years of exploitation of my grandfather.” Take a look at her full quote after the jump.

Here’s what she said:

75 years of Batman! No one could have predicted the longevity and the continued relevance of this comic book hero that has become a cultural icon when my grandfather, Bill Finger, collaborated with Bob Kane back in 1939.  My grandfather has never been properly credited as the co-creator of Batman although was an open secret in the comic book industry and is widely known now.  It is now my time to come out of the shadows and speak up and end 75 years of exploitation of my grandfather, whose biggest flaw was his inability to defend his extraordinary talent.  Due to what I feel is continued mistreatment of a true artist, I am currently exploring our rights and considering how best to establish the recognition that my grandfather deserves.

A lot of people in the comics community know of Finger’s contributions to the Batman mythos, but for much of the public, Bob Kane is the sole creator of Batman. (This Atlantic article about Batman’s creation lionizes Kane and doesn’t mention Finger once, for example.) It was only after Finger’s death that Kane acknowledged Finger’s contributions to Batman’s creation, which included almost every recognizable aspect of Batman as we know him now. Ty Templeton, illustrator of Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman, famously made fun of Kane’s glory-hounding in an iconic comic strip that illustrates what the legal creator of Batman’s sole contribution would’ve looked like.

The press release from The Comic Arts Council closes with this:

This fall, the Warner Bros. television series GOTHAM will feature many Bill Finger creations, including the city itself. Will the series that carries the name he gave to Batman’s city credit him in any way?

Will the Finger family push for a credit for Bill Finger on the show? Things look that way.

Ty Templeton Draws Batman As Created By Bob Kane And Nobody Else

Like our modern industries returning to the primitive, pulley-and-wisecracking-animal systems they were based on, today’s most successful comedians continue to return to The Flintstones. The latest are Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, who have signed on to reboot the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon for the big screen—only a few years after Seth MacFarlane abandoned his ambitions to do the same on television. 

As with MacFarlane’s scrapped version, Ferrell and McKay hope to scrub away the memories of Rosie O’Donnell dancing to The B-52s by returning the franchise to its animated roots, hiring The Campaign screenwriter Chris Henchy to shoulder alone a bronto-rib-sized burden that nearly crushed some 35 writers on 1994’s The Flintstones (to say nothing of the poor, lost souls of 2000’s The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas). No word yet on what sensibility this new, feature-length Flintstones cartoon is aiming for, but with ...