For the past 4+ years I’ve played a lot of League of Legends and written about it here. Last week I quit entirely; no longer playing the game, unsubscribed from all the reddits, not watching the broadcasts. I’m still running Logs of Lag but I’ve added a new link to the page that I suspect Riot Games will not be happy with.

The big story is Inside The Culture Of Sexism At Riot Games, a meticulously researched and detailed story about sexual harassment of employees at the company. Riot apparently is the worst kind of bro-culture and the problem starts at the top. This story was swiftly confirmed by a variety of personal reports.

Riot Games responded a few weeks later with the smarmiest of PR-crafted replies. They pinky-swear they’re going to do better by having some introspective discussions and some training. In the meantime what they’ve actually been doing is retaliating against current and former employees with aggressive legal threats. And firing highly visible employees who aren’t toeing the PR line. (I know the work of both Lehman and Klein; Riot lost some very smart people.)

Video game culture in America has a huge problem of sexism and racism. Tech companies often have sexism and racism too. But I’d somehow hoped that Riot Games was better. The individuals I know there are decent people. But the company culture created by the founders Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck is disgusting and childish. I want nothing to do with it.

One of my favorite bits of Internet art is Rainbowstep, a 2011 mashup of Skrillex and My Little Pony. It’s beautifully edited and something about the intense music and visuals never fails to evoke a strong emotional response in me.

But that link is to a crappy re-encoded copy some generous random person put online. The original video is offline with no explanation. I did a bit of digging in the Wayback Machine and it looks to have been taken offline in 2016 or 2017 on a copyright complaint by Warner Music Group, Skrillex’s corporate overlord. No idea why YouTube no longer displays the takedown notice; maybe a bug.

Fuck that! Imagine being a kid who grew up with this video. You go to look it up and revisit some of your culture and it’s just gone. OK sure the music was basically a full unlicensed copy of Skrillex’ song plus many unlicensed clips from the TV show. Yes, current copyright law means legally that video is on shaky ground. But the work as a whole had so much more art in it than those pieces, it offends me a company can just unilaterally destroy it.

FWIW the artist of the video is Zesstra Howkon, aka ZestyArt or Dastrun. Their video page on Youtube is now empty, all of their work is gone.