Internet "journo" insults Felicia Day, net goes nuts!

Interesting storyline playing out on Twitter recently.

Seems a contributor to the website Destructoid, a gaming site, decided, completely out of the blue to have a pop at Felicia, one of the internet's darlings, with these tweets...

Quote:

Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona? @feliciaday, I keep seeing everywhere. Question: Do you matter at all? Do you even provide anything useful to gaming, besides “personality? Could you be considered nothing more than a glorified booth babe? You don’t seem to add anything creative to the medium.

Now, tbf, in America, it's all about free speech, so he has the right to do so, but man, as a gaming journo, this has got to amount to professional suicide? Saying she adds nothing creative to gaming, after 5 seasons of the Guild, helping out on several games, promoting several, youtube channels such as GeekandSundry and a LOT more, he hasn't really done much research!

Needless to say, the fans responded immediately with a LOT of hatred to the man, resulting in him eventually being fired from Destructoid.

He then decided to turn on Will Wheaton!! LOL Sadly, I can't quote that here as he used foul language, but yeah, not the wisest idea

And then, amusingly, Day was defended by none other than Adam Baldwin. Heh, would like to see the loon say stuff to Baldwin in person

The guy did eventually apologise, although he blamed it on being drunk late at night and being new to Twitter and not realising that messages sent to someone on there can be seen by everyone. I'm not sure how much of I buy, but hey, it's out there.

Nicely, Felicia Day accepted the apology with good grace and has not really mentioned in any detail, other than to thank people for their support.


So, what do we think? Did he know what he was doing? Was he just INCREDIBLY stupid? Or a clever and devious plan to gain notoriety and increase his career with it?

Personally, I find it hard to believe that someone who writes on a site like that, as a contributor, can claim not to know who Felicia Day is and what she does. Thats like a football commentator not knowing who David Beckham is, it's crazy.

Either way, it will be interesting to see the numerous takes on this on the web over the next day or so before it all blows over.

Honestly, I can't see how anyone familiar with the internet, and geek culture in particular, could have not seen the absolute excrement storm such a comment about her would invariably create.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

I'm not big on football, but who is David Beckham? Wasn't he a Spice Girl husband?





















































































Kidding.

Personally, I find Day massively overrated. Of the things she's been in that I like, Dr. Horrible as an example, I find her easily the weakest part of them.

She strikes me as very phoney. She has cultivated an image as a 'gamer girl' but she's not, she's an actress. Those are two passions that demand so much time and devotion that they're almost mutually exclusive: you're not staying up to 4am to download a new release as soon as it unlocks if you're also on a shooting schedule and making appearances.

Having Mario Bros when you were 10 and playing Angry Birds on your phone between shoots does not entitle you to call yourself a gamer. That makes you as much of a gamer as Vanilla Ice is "from the streets". She makes her money being a poseur for a lifestyle and culture she's not really a part of and I just shake my head at those who buy into it and clap for more. As a gamer who has put in the work and knows actual girl gamers, she definitely does not have g-word privileges as far as I'm concerned.



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I wonder if this guy ignored the lessons from Ocean marketing and the guy that went after The oatmeal (and other similar incident's I can't remember)

On the topic, I do love "I was drunk so it's not my fault" defense. Was there not that Eve Guild Master who used the same excuse when he told people to attack another person in Eve?

Anyway, I expect no one will remember this gaming journalist a year or so from now but will still be enjoying what Felicia Day does.

There is just something so absurdly funny about geeks being so judgemental...


As for the journalist - I buy they may have been drunk. I do not buy them not knowing how Twitter works. I mean seriously? A contributor to a gaming site being so clueless about Twitter? I find that hard to believe.

Really Butane? I mean really? Lmao.

Yeah this guy was an idiot. Ms. Day and The Oatmeal Guy?! *facepalm* wow

It doesn't matter if it were Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, Chris Hardwick or any other pop culture icon - geek or not - that we have.

As with any public-view profession (Journalism or otherwise) what you do and say is going to be held under scrutiny and - as in this case - subject to public opinion and the consequences therein. People are particularly outspoken about slights against "their" icon of the moment, and as seen many times in the past, that backlash can have severe ramifications.

It boils down to "he should have known better."

It's 106 miles to Grandville, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing faceless helmets

... Hit it ...

I think it's a little from column A and a little from column B myself.

In Felicia Day's defense, she's very passionate about Geek Culture. I've tuned into her live stream with her and some of her contemporaries talking about fiction they've read (it's like a monthly book club thing, and I can't say the name on the forums, save to say that the first part of the name is like Virginia), and she's knowledgeable. And not in a passing way. This is all being shown in an uncensored, unedited way where she's even getting a little drunk live on camera.

If there's detriment to be placed here, it's that she's used her celebrity to further her career, and that's something pretty much every celebrity does, even those whose sole attribute as a celebrity is being a celebrity. I can't really blame her for doing that. Alright, so she's an actor who makes her own web show and parlayed the success of that to get her more acting work. Sounds like someone who's clever to me rather than someone who's ruthlessly exploiting a section of culture.

She's certainly not alone. Look at how Wil Wheaton (who has a lot of varied interests and is very vocal in his own geek leanings) has done the same but with much less fanfare and a broad embracing by the geek community.

The real crux of the issue is here (at least to refrence Johnny B's posts) is the nature of geek culture. Like it or not, acknowledge it or not, but geek culture is now mainstream. I grew up as a fat kid with glasses who played D&D during his lunchtimes at school, obssessively played his Commodore 64, could recite the original D&D rules back to front, and was reading Tolkien seriously by the age of 14. And I got teased and bullied for it.

Now these things are embraced wholeheartedly and largely because the people involved in it are now the people who have given us the Internet and are the movers and shakers in society. They're now as socially powerful as sports heroes and movie stars were, and arguably moreso because there's no one demographic that 'geek heroes' come from.

And the term 'gamer' is mainstream now too. People game on smartphones and Facebook and it's something do as part of their lives rather than as a majority of it when you did indeed have to dedicate serious time to it...but I guarantee you that if I could've played my old C64 games on a smartphone, I would've. Gamers have evolved and changed, really.

The journalist either was drunk or maybe resentful of working on something about her and saying 'oh, this isn't real news and this is so beneath me' or something of that order. He got publicity for his actions, but it was all negative. Internet society is instant and a living breathing thing. You can't make a comment in isolation anymore and think it won't get noticed by someone, somewhere. It was a foolish move and it cost them their job, so if that was a publicity stunt, it was a costly one.

Felicia Day I suspect is what I percieve her to be: a professional making a living out of things she loves doing. So of course there's going to be a perception of her as being phony, because she's making money from it. Can't be genuine, right?

If there's anything I'd personally observe about her is that she doesn't appear to have let her fame go to her head, and she's enjoying the ride.

Hey, I would too.



S.