Anita Sarkeesian

Well, I called it. Many times over the last year, I’ve talked about how Anita Sarkeesian was getting ready to abandon video games and their sphere of influence so that she could move into more profitable waters. Today, she announced just that. But before I get to that part, let’s take a look back at one of my earlier call…

From late January

 

I think Anita is getting ready to move on past video games. Ms. Sarkeesian wants to be a cultural critic at-large, and she surely realizes that talking about vidya is not going to bring her up to that level. Yes, she’s become wildly famous and gained a good chuck of money off all this, but that’s as far as her career is ever going to go if she doesn’t wrap this up soon. She can always come out and ramble on whenever some gaming controversy is in the news, don’t get me wrong. But if she wants to be a real talking head, she has to move into politics. I believe that’s exactly what she’s gonna try to do. There’s a lot more competition on that front, though. I don’t believe it’s going to be as easy as she (and McIntosh) thinks. Only time will tell. Whatever the case may be, we’ll always be there to point out her lies.

Now, take a look at The Washington Post from earlier today

Today, on International Women’s Day, she’s kicking off a $200,000 campaign to fund a new video series called “Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History” that will explore the lives of historical women ranging from pirate Ching Shih to reformer Ida B. Wells. Sarkeesian will narrate the videos — the first season will be five episodes long — and they’ll feature animation and costume design inspired by the era in each woman lived as well as original music to be performed on period instruments.

The project has been on Sarkeesian’s to-do list for years. And though the video series that made her both famous and a target of ferocious online harassment, “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” explored a very different subject — the way female characters are depicted and function in many games — it also renewed her belief that “Ordinary Women” was important.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t begrudge Anita’s move here. Everyone has the right to move on from certain topics if they so choose. Hell, I’ve sort of moved on from areas of discussion myself. I only talk about GamerGate in broad terms now and usually don’t get involved in the day-to-day anymore. I’m never going to quit discussing it altogether, as you saw with the recent Jamie Walton/Alison Rapp stuff, and the Kotaku failure that related to them both. But we all have to diversify at a certain point.

The problem here is Ms. Sarkeesian still hasn’t fulfilled the promises she made during her last mega-fundraiser. She reminds me of RogueStar, although to give her some slight credit, at least she came a little closer than he has when it comes to fulfilling the stated goals. However, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades…certainly not crowdfunding.

Charlie Nash puts it pretty well over on Breitbart Tech

Because of the lack of content, many people have criticised Feminist Frequency over their business and production skills, citing the amount of money raised compared to the quality and frequency of the organisation’s videos. The matters were also made worse when it was discovered Sarkeesian was charging up to $20,000 per public speech.

Interestingly, McIntosh seems to have been scrubbed from the new project altogether, with no mention of him on the “Team” page of the crowdfunding campaign.

So far, Sarkeesian has raised nearly $4,000 of her $200,000 project goal and there are just under 30 days left for the series to reach its funding. The project is hosted on “Seed and Spark,” a different crowdfunding platform to Sarkeesian’s previous campaign. It is unknown as to why Sarkeesian has decided to host the campaign on a lesser-known platform, but I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her previous project’s platform, Kickstarter, requires users to deliver on their campaign promises.

Where are the DVD’s you promised, Anita? I guess you were too busy charging $20K per speech to get that minimum requirement done. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move on, the continued fraudulent behavior is what I take issue with.

Then again, anyone giving this scam artist money at this point pretty much gets what they deserve.