oddish
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- Joined
- Aug 7, 2013
"Extra Credits" is a gaming channel that makes godawful "analysis" videos about videos games. The show started as a ripoff of Yahtzee that they made as a school project, and never progressed much further than that in quality. In it, they draw from their non existent "expertise" in game design that they have thanks to their founder being a low level consultant for a bunch of low tier studios and mobile games. Thanks to this, all of their videos are entry level garbage or ads for bad indie games made by people they are probably friends with, and are peppered with far left propaganda, which is why they are wrong about everything 90% of the time.
However, these are still better than their new series of videos about things like history, where they go into full history revisionism mode to push an agenda by doing things like leaving out the fact that Genghis Khan was one of history's most prolific rapists so that they could paint him as some sort of progressive hero. Or their even newer series about fiction, where every episode has several minutes set aside for calling the authors they are talking about racist and sexist.
The channel's co-creator, James Portnow, is known for being an insufferable douche with a video game addiction that starts fights online with people he doesn't agree with, and treats his colleges and co-workers like shit, to the point that everyone, including Danial Floyd (the other co-founder), have fucked off or were removed from his channel because of disagreements.
In recent days, Portnow has been accused in recent days of sexual harassment.
Just in time for pride month!
In the linked twitter thread, his ex (who used to work for EC) says that, after they broke up, he used his position on the channel to make sure the Extra Credits creates as much content as possible that would force him and her to work closely together. When she told him she doesn't want that and that she will not be doing the series they were doing together anymore, he exploded and started harassing her. After blocking him and asking him to leave her alone MULTIPLE TIMES, she was forced to quit to get away from him. James then told everyone he knew that she did something that left him with no choice but to fire her, that he allowed her to resign to save her reputation, and that he paid her her last paycheck out of pity. The woman in question claims that none of that is true.
He then went on to force everyone who disagreed with him out of the company (I am calling it a company for brevity's sake).
Now, the allegations themselves are a bit questionable because, while Portnow is a goony beard feminist of the kind known for turning out to be a sex pest, his accuser is herself a blue haired, feminist lolcow of the type known for crying rape when someone makes eye contact with her.
Since I'm too lazy to do this myself, here is a post about her by @neural that I will quote in its entirety, containing screencaps of her allegations and other lolcowery (no points for guessing she is friends with Brianna Wu).
Or, at least, the allegations would be questionable, were it not for two other people coming out to corroborate that James is an asshole.
Holly Green, formally of Destructoid and Gameranx (among others)
And Russ Pit, formally of Polygon.
EC responded to this reveal with this clarification saying basically "James Portnow did nothing wrong" (probably written by James Portnow).
People aren't buying it and calling him a sex pest, while his own subreddit demands his resignation.
This all comes right on the heels of one of the contributors to their lets play channel, Will Overgard, being fired for "misconduct" that was never specified as early as this April. Just two fucking months ago!
But this is far from the only controversies they've been involved in. Here are some of them in as close to chronological order as I can get them without actually bothering to check.
1. Their resident artist had something wrong with her shoulder, so they had a fundraiser to pay to hire other artists to work in her stead until she gets better, while also implying the money is needed for her medical expenses. While some of the Escapist forum was smart enough to understand how stupid that is, that her injury isn't serious, and that they could just have forum artist work for free to get exposure, the rest were dumb enough to donate over 104,000$ (they were only asking for 15k), only to have Allison never go back to working full time and soon after leave EC to get a real job at a video game studio, despite supposedly still being too injured to work full time on their videos just before.
2. When the fundraiser ended with a massive surplus, the team decided to take the money and form an indie game company, instead of re-compensating TheEscapist for thousands of dollars worth of free donation incentives that they provided for the fundraiser. The bushiness relationship ended soon after.
They were then briefly hired by PennyArcade, but kicked out of there also during downsizing.
3. GamerGate rolls around and EC, who are close friends with people like Leigh Alexander and the like, of course, come out against it. Soon after the little cartoon characters in their videos start wearing hijabs. All this comes shortly after they made a video talking about not backing down from controversy when people accuse games and gaming of being bad and making people bad. "Games cause sexism" I guess was not on the list of things you should not back down from.
4. On top of the fake indie game company, Portnow formed some sort of gamer advocacy group with another massive fundraiser.
5. The money from either one or both (might have even been the same money), is distributed among James' students, who he insists were simply the most deserving.
6. Neither the indie game company, nor the advocacy group ever produce anything of note (or possibly anything at all).
7. No explanation is ever given for what happened to the rest of that money.
8. Then Portnow decides that, seeing as how TotalBiscuit had just been admitted to the hospital for cemo treatments and was in bad condition, now is the best time to talk shit about him at a convention and demand he denounce GamerGate, as well as attack him on twitter.
Portnow asked Bane to stop talking about ethics and floated an unfounded rumor that he was involved in an undisclosed paid promotion. TB responded by verbally demolishing him and people created the hashtag #IHearWhatIHear, posting shit like "James Portnow raped and murdered a 13 year old girl in 1997 #IHearWhatIHear".
Here is the video of James talking shit about TB
9. Despite supposedly being gamer advocates, they constantly defend anti-consumer practices like DLC, lootboxes and that time Valve tried to make paid mods mandatory and take 75% of the profit.
10. Made a video with MovieBob. (I wonder if he knew about the sexual harassment stuff like he did with Devin Faraci)
Here are some of my favorite Extra Credits videos:
The "Hatred" video - Where they knowledge that the developers openly admit they are riling people up for attention, but EC are still so butthurt that they have to give their two cents about how much they hate the game, in a video urging people not to give them any more attention, while they themselves are doing exactly that.
The "Gaming Compulsion" video - Where they talk about gaming addiction and James describes his own battle with gaming addiction, in an unedited segment that ends with him crying. What I love about this video is how, throughout all of it, Daniel Floyd insist on calling it a "Gaming Compulsion", as if that makes a difference, to defend gaming's precious reputation.
The "We are running out of internet" - The video where they explain that we are running out of internet because there isn't enough room for all of it in the air (??????)
Any history video from the last 3 months - Where they glorify Islam or bring up slavery unprompted, and then go out of their way to downplay it when the slaves were white or the slave owners weren't.
EDIT:
A new "best" EC video has been made. (Jul 3, 2019 )
In this one they seriously suggest (within the first 30 seconds, no less) that playing games where you're on the german side of WW2 will turn you into an actual nazi.
The video is currently sitting pretty at 12k to 155k like to dislike ratio (worse ratio than the most disliked video on YT) and was followed by one of their staff tweeting that they don't care about dislikes and are happy people are unsubbing
before desperately backpedaling and trying to add nuance to the video description where they previously told people who don't like it to fuck off. The memes have been pretty funny.
View attachment 828005View attachment 828002View attachment 828003
However, these are still better than their new series of videos about things like history, where they go into full history revisionism mode to push an agenda by doing things like leaving out the fact that Genghis Khan was one of history's most prolific rapists so that they could paint him as some sort of progressive hero. Or their even newer series about fiction, where every episode has several minutes set aside for calling the authors they are talking about racist and sexist.
The channel's co-creator, James Portnow, is known for being an insufferable douche with a video game addiction that starts fights online with people he doesn't agree with, and treats his colleges and co-workers like shit, to the point that everyone, including Danial Floyd (the other co-founder), have fucked off or were removed from his channel because of disagreements.
In recent days, Portnow has been accused in recent days of sexual harassment.
Just in time for pride month!
In the linked twitter thread, his ex (who used to work for EC) says that, after they broke up, he used his position on the channel to make sure the Extra Credits creates as much content as possible that would force him and her to work closely together. When she told him she doesn't want that and that she will not be doing the series they were doing together anymore, he exploded and started harassing her. After blocking him and asking him to leave her alone MULTIPLE TIMES, she was forced to quit to get away from him. James then told everyone he knew that she did something that left him with no choice but to fire her, that he allowed her to resign to save her reputation, and that he paid her her last paycheck out of pity. The woman in question claims that none of that is true.
He then went on to force everyone who disagreed with him out of the company (I am calling it a company for brevity's sake).
Now, the allegations themselves are a bit questionable because, while Portnow is a goony beard feminist of the kind known for turning out to be a sex pest, his accuser is herself a blue haired, feminist lolcow of the type known for crying rape when someone makes eye contact with her.
Since I'm too lazy to do this myself, here is a post about her by @neural that I will quote in its entirety, containing screencaps of her allegations and other lolcowery (no points for guessing she is friends with Brianna Wu).
Or, at least, the allegations would be questionable, were it not for two other people coming out to corroborate that James is an asshole.
Holly Green, formally of Destructoid and Gameranx (among others)
And Russ Pit, formally of Polygon.
EC responded to this reveal with this clarification saying basically "James Portnow did nothing wrong" (probably written by James Portnow).
People aren't buying it and calling him a sex pest, while his own subreddit demands his resignation.
This all comes right on the heels of one of the contributors to their lets play channel, Will Overgard, being fired for "misconduct" that was never specified as early as this April. Just two fucking months ago!
But this is far from the only controversies they've been involved in. Here are some of them in as close to chronological order as I can get them without actually bothering to check.
1. Their resident artist had something wrong with her shoulder, so they had a fundraiser to pay to hire other artists to work in her stead until she gets better, while also implying the money is needed for her medical expenses. While some of the Escapist forum was smart enough to understand how stupid that is, that her injury isn't serious, and that they could just have forum artist work for free to get exposure, the rest were dumb enough to donate over 104,000$ (they were only asking for 15k), only to have Allison never go back to working full time and soon after leave EC to get a real job at a video game studio, despite supposedly still being too injured to work full time on their videos just before.
2. When the fundraiser ended with a massive surplus, the team decided to take the money and form an indie game company, instead of re-compensating TheEscapist for thousands of dollars worth of free donation incentives that they provided for the fundraiser. The bushiness relationship ended soon after.
They were then briefly hired by PennyArcade, but kicked out of there also during downsizing.
3. GamerGate rolls around and EC, who are close friends with people like Leigh Alexander and the like, of course, come out against it. Soon after the little cartoon characters in their videos start wearing hijabs. All this comes shortly after they made a video talking about not backing down from controversy when people accuse games and gaming of being bad and making people bad. "Games cause sexism" I guess was not on the list of things you should not back down from.
4. On top of the fake indie game company, Portnow formed some sort of gamer advocacy group with another massive fundraiser.
5. The money from either one or both (might have even been the same money), is distributed among James' students, who he insists were simply the most deserving.
6. Neither the indie game company, nor the advocacy group ever produce anything of note (or possibly anything at all).
7. No explanation is ever given for what happened to the rest of that money.
8. Then Portnow decides that, seeing as how TotalBiscuit had just been admitted to the hospital for cemo treatments and was in bad condition, now is the best time to talk shit about him at a convention and demand he denounce GamerGate, as well as attack him on twitter.
Portnow asked Bane to stop talking about ethics and floated an unfounded rumor that he was involved in an undisclosed paid promotion. TB responded by verbally demolishing him and people created the hashtag #IHearWhatIHear, posting shit like "James Portnow raped and murdered a 13 year old girl in 1997 #IHearWhatIHear".
Here is the video of James talking shit about TB
9. Despite supposedly being gamer advocates, they constantly defend anti-consumer practices like DLC, lootboxes and that time Valve tried to make paid mods mandatory and take 75% of the profit.
10. Made a video with MovieBob. (I wonder if he knew about the sexual harassment stuff like he did with Devin Faraci)
Here are some of my favorite Extra Credits videos:
The "Hatred" video - Where they knowledge that the developers openly admit they are riling people up for attention, but EC are still so butthurt that they have to give their two cents about how much they hate the game, in a video urging people not to give them any more attention, while they themselves are doing exactly that.
The "Gaming Compulsion" video - Where they talk about gaming addiction and James describes his own battle with gaming addiction, in an unedited segment that ends with him crying. What I love about this video is how, throughout all of it, Daniel Floyd insist on calling it a "Gaming Compulsion", as if that makes a difference, to defend gaming's precious reputation.
The "We are running out of internet" - The video where they explain that we are running out of internet because there isn't enough room for all of it in the air (??????)
Any history video from the last 3 months - Where they glorify Islam or bring up slavery unprompted, and then go out of their way to downplay it when the slaves were white or the slave owners weren't.
EDIT:
A new "best" EC video has been made. (Jul 3, 2019 )
In this one they seriously suggest (within the first 30 seconds, no less) that playing games where you're on the german side of WW2 will turn you into an actual nazi.
The video is currently sitting pretty at 12k to 155k like to dislike ratio (worse ratio than the most disliked video on YT) and was followed by one of their staff tweeting that they don't care about dislikes and are happy people are unsubbing
before desperately backpedaling and trying to add nuance to the video description where they previously told people who don't like it to fuck off. The memes have been pretty funny.
View attachment 828005View attachment 828002View attachment 828003
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