Sunday 18 January 2015

(SATIRE) Patreon to implement full ethical code of practice before the coming of winter*

Trigger Warning: The following work of satirical fiction imagines a dark alternate reality where Brianna Wu really is Batman, where Zoe Quinn is dating Bruce Wuyne, where Josh McIntosh's wish upon a star transforms Anita Sarkeesian from a blank wooden automaton into a real girl, and where Patreon doesn't get around to implementing a fair, ethical code of conduct for its users, which of course it will because of all the “super helpful” emails people keep sending to the founders of the company offering encouragement and advice on how to do just that.

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Not since Captain Scott found himself locked in a fierce contest with the Norwegian 'icetronaut' - Captain Roald Amundsen - in a race to be first to the South Pole, has the world been so gripped by the outcome of a contest for dominance between two mighty warrior kings of our age.

On one side, the fantasy novelist - George 'winter is coming... eventually' Martin – moves with slow but deliberate purpose towards finishing the two remaining books in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, which he began writing in 1809, a year after the invention of wolves.

His opponent in the race to get shit done is the upstart peddler of e-welfare – Patreon: an online service that, in the past, has allowed impoverished hipsters to whine their way to a kind of haphazard financial solvency. Patreon is now clawing a path towards respectability by implementing a long awaited code of conduct for its users; one that will close off the possibility of the service being used as a spawning point for fiendish acts of high bastardry.

At the time of writing, people who claim to be experts on this kind of thing have judged both parties to be neck and neck in a race to the finish.

Youtube blogger Cassie Amos said:

George 'all special snowflakes are doomed to die' Martin recently translated the first novel in A Song of Ice and Fire into the language of wolves. Last week he posted a new chapter from book six in the saga – The Fretful Winds of Summersby Place – written from the point of view of Tyrion Lannister's glove as it describes another glove belonging to Daenerys Targaryen. At the end of the chapter one of the gloves is thrown into a fire, while the other is carried away by a crow and dropped in the sea. I will definitely be attending PAX this year dressed as a sexy glove.”

Despite the recent burst of progress from Martin, Patreon remain confident that they will emerge as victor in the race to finish what they started: A spokesperson for the company said:

Our new code of ethical practice for users is currently at the calibration stage. We are currently attempting to fine-tune all the variables by applying them to one of our most disadvantaged users, in this instance a profoundly disabled man with brittle bone disease. In the interests of accuracy we are also running a control group where over-privileged users, who have very little to complain about, will be carry will allowed to carry on acting like total arseholes with complete impunity. Only by subjecting our new code of practice to these two extremes can we develop a set of rules that gathers together all our users beneath the rainbow of equality.

To ensure that our new rules are implemented with complete impartiality, Patreon will turn over the day to day application of our ethics strategy to a pseudo A.I. This has been coded using the exciting new 'And N' programming language, designed by Nathan Grayson by accident during his slapstick attempt to insult the journalist lothario - Milo Yiannopoulos - on the internet.”

The spokesperson added:

Winter is coming but ethics are coming first. Ride the ethics wave in the year 2093AD*”

Freelance Games Journalist, Lyle Havers, who claims to have a lover in every AAA Games Development Team from Amsterdam to Port Royale, said:

The race between George Martin and Patreon is shaping up to be a real tortoise and the hare situation, only with two tortoises. For some fucking reason one of the tortoises has three eyes.”


*MODE 5 has been asked to point out that 2093AD is a provisional date only.


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