See that post title just above these words? And the link I’m adding to this name right here? => That‘s how SEO works, Charles Carreon Attorney At Law.
Matthew Inman, author of The Oatmeal, responds by publishing his plans to raise $20, 000 for Wildlife Conservation and Cancer Research instead of sending it to this lawyer acting for Funny Junk. If you feel like making a gesture in support, you could donate some money by clicking on the link below. [UPDATE: Mashable reports that Inman raised the $20K in less than an hour after publishing his response on his blog, checking the donation page shows more than $100K now raised. The National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society are doing well out of the SEO cluelessness of Charles Carreon Attorney At Law.]
Categories: ethics & philosophy, law & order, technology
Privacy, Transparency, Surveillance and Sousveillance 
Quicklinks: #socialmedia #erosion #storm #bust – oops here comes Jack Bauer 
Hoyden About Town 
BTW, just for tangential LOLs, here’s a couple of my favourite comics from The Oatmeal:
Cat vs Internet
I Tried To Watch Game Of Thrones And This Is What Happened
I was just a bit disappointed when he brought the lawyer’s mother into it. Apart from that it was a brilliant takedown.
I love The Oatmeal comics!
One bit from the second comic made me lol.
It’s when the guy gets to the bit torrent site, and the ad says, “impossibly proportioned girls who want to date your testicles.” And there’s a pic of such a girl with speech bubbles: “Moar testicles! Yes!”
Um… I have this friend who… may or may not be addicted to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. She hasn’t figured out how to get access to it legally and thus streams it from sites with ads featuring ladies who want moar testicles.
I’m on the Oatmeal’s side in this, but the casual misogyny isn’t pretty – making “jokes” about the lawyer’s mother, as Mindy mentioned; and in the Game of Thrones strip, there’s some stupid “I can call this (fictional) woman a c*nt because my female friend did, take it up with her” argument which wouldn’t last a second if a white person pulled it about their black friend using the n-word, so it’s okay for them too.
Yes, The Oatmeal has more than a few incidents of Ally Fail in the timeline, and the “defences” are half-arsed at best. I still like a lot of stuff Matt does? Even that GoT one? PROBLEMATIC.
I know the above is a flip response, but part of me is acknowledging that “c*unthammer” is an almost perfect description of how George R.R.Martin wrote Cersei’s character, with all the misogynistic aspects of her narrative arc encapsulated in that one word. Which is GRRM in a nutshell. I’m annoyed that he’s managed to suck me in despite my recognising just how shittily he treats the women in his story, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t care about the fate of his characters, especially since I know that I can’t trust him to save my favourites.
It is disappointing that writers who mostly manage to grok injustice so clearly still fail when it comes to sexism though. I do get that, for both Inman and GRRM.
Good points TT.
I’m on the back foot here, I haven’t read or watched GoT – I suspect I would find the treatment of women too traumatic; I’m already yelling at GRRM’s “historically accurate” bullsplaining. And I cannot figure out what “c*nthammer” is supposed to mean.
I’m just randomly raging at the usual injustice that a cool comic (the Oatmeal) has to be approached with caution because the creator’s first name is Matthew, basically. And it sounds like you’re saying the same about GoT and George.
I think it’s also worth noting the Oatmeal comic about things one can do with a prostitute in which the woman is literally an object, and suggested to be used as items including a birdfeeder, as if sex workers aren’t dehumanized and abused enough.
Bringing in the lawyer’s mother, after that, makes me feel like this isn’t a person whose views of women as actual human beings is sufficient for me to bother supporting him.
Amadi, if you have any spare cash, I’d send it Anita Sarkeesian’s way, rather than Matthew Inman’s. Far better use of the money, for sure. The Oatmeal will get plenty of money from people who don’t care about feminism.
Aqua, it looks like a wordplay on Warhammer, and a very nasty one at that.
My son had a brief flirtation with Warhammer. The company runs shops with tables where teenagers come to play with, paint and swap the little figurines, which I quite liked. The teenage boys I saw seemed friendly and quite lovely. Of course, you don’t know what they get up to online. Every so often there would be a girl – tomboyish, rejecting of pink and bling. The twentysomething shop guys would banter with them like the others. It seemed like quite a nice scene.
Yeah, I play that. Look for models of women. Your options are bloodthirtsy bikini witch elves, warrior nuns in space suits, or damsels protected by knights. The books say “every able bodied adult across the galaxy”, but the models come in three flavours, the girl you can’t have as your girlfriend, your psycho ex girlfriend, or your mum, and most armies do away with them altogether.
I see Matt. And yes, the able-bodied thing as well.
Just as well it never stuck with him.
I’m a roleplayer from way back, so I am familiar with Warhammer – I think of it as the physical precursor of those violent macho videogames. That makes me think Cersei is being put down as one of those women who dares to play boys’ games with the boys? I’m certainly not a fan of violent machismo, but I’m not going to blame a woman who responds to it by joining in. It’s hardly her fault that that’s the culture around her.
(Similarly, I’ve decided that while I may find the behaviour of ERV’s Abbie Smith unfortunate, it’s not her fault she is in such a misogynistic culture that what she’s doing actually looks like a sensible strategy to her. I mean, it would be better if she was contributing to dismantling rather than shoring up misogyny, but that does tend to be more effort and riskier.)
Cersei is not one of the women who takes up weapons in GoT, so it’s not quite that. She is basically every negative stereotype about women as lying, manipulative, power-hungry treacherous whores wrapped up inside a Femininity-2K-compliant shell, and at one point she explicitly says (as part of womanly advice to Sansa Stark) that since she wasn’t allowed to learn weaponry like her twin brother, that she learnt to use the weapon between her legs instead.
I played Warhammer for years when I was in uni, starting when it was first published. I’m a bit confused by the “violent machismo” labelling – it’s just another roleplaying game, very similar to D&D in flavour, but with a different operating system and mythology. There’s combat (or there can be), but that’s not all there is.
FYI: After several interesting further developments, Charles Carreon has finally withdrawn Funnyjunk’s lawsuit against The Oatmeal, plus his own later suit requesting an injunction against Matt and Indiegogo receiving the monies from the fundraiser.