Doom community happenings

I'm torn on this whole thing. Far as I can tell, general support for trans people to have the same rights as anyone else is a good thing. The Doom community has an unusually high percentage of trans people, many of whom are honestly excellent mappers, saying "thank you!" to them seems like a good thing. Donating to a questionable charity that does questionable things under the guise of humanitarianism is considerably less good. Blindly following the pack to the donation line after doing naught to understand the details of what the charity actually does is very, very un-good.

Reddit is a pile of shit on the whole and I care not if the Doom side of Reddit crashes and burns or how many people they ban or whatever else. Fuck that noise chamber.

The biggest thing I don't get is: how on Earth is this an excuse for YET ANOTHER "the way Romero did" mapset though? And with dumbass changes to weapon functionality and features that can't even run in PrBoom+ and shit? The rules and outline for the mapset itself are total garabge. The intent is nice enough, but misguided. Romero doesn't need "support", he has had morons fill his inbox with moronic shit on many occasions. None of these people e-yelling at him are going to do jack shit. Just ignore them rather than validating them and giving them the attention that they're oh-so-desperately craving.

If there has to be a mapset dedicated to trans people.. (which in itself is kinda weird - we've never made mapsets for black Doomers, poor Doomers, etc. despite the fact that they are also minorities who face oppression) ..then why in the name of fuck aren't we trying to emulate the best-of-the-best mapping done by the many trans Doomers out there?? It just doesn't make a lick of sense no matter how you slice it.

If you want my cynical take: the whole thing just reeks of "lets make a middling mapset that gets WAY more attention and gameplay time than it deserves because it's piggybacking a currently hot political issue". That's kinda gross. I don't want to put it so bluntly on the main front (Doomworld) but I figure those that dare venture to this neck of the woods will be prepared for a slightly less diplomatic take on the issue.

I have no problem with making a community project in the style of various trans Doom mappers as a big thank you to them for all their work. What I do take issue with is using political issues to ensure your mapset (with weird gross rules and restrictions) gets a gazillion tons of attention while other, more deserving works remain in the background.

I think I get where you're coming from. I just know that it would mean the world to a lot of trans people if we made a mapset that has them in mind - like I said, it does strike me as kind of weird to make a mapset specifically for the fact that these people are a minority and in some cases have faced oppression, but really, is it causing any harm to do it? They have it hard enough just by virtue of going through hell that (I assume) grappling with gender must be. I've always known I'm a man and am confident in my man-ness (rofl) but I just don't see any harm in giving a token of appreciation to people who must have it really shit in their lives overall.

It does raise the problem of other people who deserve some love but not getting it - there are people of all walks of life, of all races, genders and etc who have rolled a shitty roll in the game of life who probably deserve a nice little token and will never get it - but man, what the hell can you do? It's a big crazy imbalanced world. You'll never be able to do a nice (even if token) gesture for everyone. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do a nice thing for some of the people some of the time who have it kinda fucked up and difficult in their everyday life, though.

I guess I can see the perspective that "this is such a meaningless gesture as to almost be insulting in and of itself" but a lot of people are supporting it and it's clearly going to happen so we may as well at least shape it into something that takes notes from BTSX or something rather than being the bazillionth "wish we were Romero" wad. Positive token gestures are better than no gestures at all.. I think?

I'm not sure, but I don't think people "decide" to be trans, it probably is just a mental and physical struggle that occurs naturally, so I don't think there's much to fear that this will "normalise mental illness" or something. The people who grapple with it were going to be grappling with it regardless.

It's a complex issue to be sure and there are a million takes on it, none more or less valid than any other.

In conclusion, I have The Big Gay and am a stupid bleeding-heart liberal who is probably doing more to hurt a cause I support than help it, but if that is the case, I genuinely can't see it yet. Also I don't think you're homophobic or trans phobic or whatever, you've made it pretty damn clear that you don't want any harm to come to them and don't want their way of life criminalized or whatever else. To me, that's enough to tick the "clearly not phobic" box. Others opinions may vary.

esselfortium sucks

Did you ever stop to consider why this is?  Do you really think it's coincidence that a lot of active Doom community members are (content removed)?  Is nature making that many mistakes during the creation and gestation of human embryos?                                           Or is the more obvious and logical explanation that these people's minds are compromised, and that this whole LGBTQAI thing has become trendy and now young people are being propagandized and brainwashed early in life to think that they are a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice versa.  As an added bonus, it gives them one more thing to be outraged about on social media, and we all love to be outraged, now don't we?  Those people don't need surgery, they need parents who know how to properly raise a child.

Romero is a not a person to be idolized or emulated.  Regardless of his clear and indisputable talent as a level designer and game creator, he clearly has a lot of personal issues.  I still remember when he came out publicly and told anyone who voted for Trump to unfriend him, because "we have nothing important in common."  Wow.  So you are writing off a massive portion of the population simply because they may have a different political stance on certain issues than you do?  Funny how I can't seem to recall anyone doing that when Obama won.  How open-minded John.  Love the condescending attitude too, like you've got it all figured out Johnny Boy and us conservatives are all morons.  Yep, people are all exactly what their media-crafted stereotype says they are, right John?  The world is totally black and white, no shades of grey whatsoever.  By the way, he was about 49 years old at the time he wrote that, and what a way to showcase a lack of maturity.  Something tells me that he's been a dickhead for a long time, and that probably had a lot to do with why id software gave him his walking papers, why Ion Storm failed, and also why he can't keep a wife for more than 9 years or so.

That's actually the subject that brought me to this forum here. When I found from my twitter about John Romero's appearance to that livestream, I was just curious to see what the community thinks, mostly I knew these subjects are very politicised and there would be drama so I searched on Doomworld. The subject wasn't discussed yet but I saw a lot of older posts about Doom and trans, one of them mentioning Doomer Boards (if you want to be hateful go there, something like that). I didn't know about the existence of this forum before. And I knew people would talk here more freely about the taboo subjects.

Anyway,. reading this Doomworld post now I realize something is not going very well there, at least if you don't absolutely talk about Doom. It didn't seem PC to me before when I was casually reading and participating on the Doom specific threads. Ok,. the fact is I only see the admins go on how transphobic still some people are, but you can't see it because essel has deleted the posts as she says, so what's the point? Linguica goes on closing the thread because he can't tolerate some different opinions, everything else must be transphobia. To be honest, I still cannot see what escalated in that thread, most of the stuff are not truly hateful, maybe because some real troll posts were deleted? It gives me the impression that people calling transphobia out of nothing. That thread and any other thread on Doomworld about the subject doesn't show there is a problem of haters with the doom community.

I think something else happens. Because these subjects are so politicised today and everyone is calling others phobes, there are reactions when we hear that JR casually supported trans rights. 10 or 20 years ago I would hear the same story and say "Ohh, how nice of him!" and move on. Nowadays you get suspicious with how these subjects or overused, so I think if there were trolls they weren't even transphobic but maybe wanted to troll those of that political mindset. I don't actually care/mind if someone wants to change sex (I think saying it's a mental disorder is too simplistic and similar to saying autism or depression doesn't exist) or even if they invent new pronouns and 46 genders. But you know what bothers me? When they want to push that into laws (see the Jordan Peterson debates) and if you think "no, I don't want to be forced to remember different pronouns and taken out of context if I fail so" then this is transphobia for them. Also, the original livestream charity happened as a response to some guy (who was the creator of IT Crowd if I recall) that maybe expressed his disagreement whether we should allow transitioning/hormones to very young children. And that for me is a genuine question, it's not transphobia. They crucified Owen Benjamin when he expressed that as a comedian. Is that forbidden? To ask whether we go too fast, injecting children with hormones and so on at an age that we don't know if the children genuinely are trans or is in their imagination? Hell, we don't even allow children to drink alcohol before 18, but transitioning at a much earlier age is ok and I cannot even question that? I thought transphobia would be to hate on these people. But usually when transphobia comes out as a slur, it's against JBP who doesn't want to be forced to use pronouns by the law and I don't think he specifically hates trans people, it's also against people casually making the question whether we went too far. Because that's when people usually overuse the -phobias and -isms. When there is casual criticism and people want to be able to discuss the subjects and have different opinions.

Anyway, I am glad I found this forum, because I just don't like/trust some of the attitudes in Doomworld.

I'm having a hard time believing Kevansevans is not a troll. Dedicating a poorly organized Doom project to trans people and Romero (while claiming that Doom 2 was lackluster!), parodying DTWID, promising a "natural sequel" in the UDMF format with custom monsters and stuff for some reason, writing tons of text but not having a single screenshot to show... I mean, if I wanted to provoke the Doomworld crowd, that's exactly what I would have done. This is just too perfect.

Yeah this really feels like a parody but apparently the project is serious and it's still going on at the ZDoom forums.

It’s quite a contrast how the people at ZDoom forums can handle this kind of thing without losing their shit. It’s like two different planets really, kudos to them. On one hand I wish sexual issues would be kept out of Doom and games in general, but on the other hand people should mind their own fucken business and get triggered pretty easily. I live in hope that one day it will just be about the game itself, but apparently some find that too boring.

Boy am I so glad I missed this shit, what the fuck?

So what was the kill count? Who got waxed?

So I guess this is the place to discuss Doom if you don't suck kevansevans dick properly? Just wanted to say hello.

It's not possible for me to view the ZDoom site or forums since the meltdown on DW.