World of Warcraft: Current Year

elbas said:

One thing that doesn't make sense is why a hotel room would be named the Cosby suite. It doesn't seem like it really has anything to do with a random conference room at Blizzard which happens to look like a Cosby sweater. Why take the Cosby poster to a generic hotel room and call it the Cosby suite? I'm sure many of us work in offices where the conference rooms have quirky names like "Mt. Rushmore" or whatever, but it doesn't make sense to carry that name over to a hotel room at a conference. Was there something that went on in the Cosby conference room at Blizzard that would make it similar to the room at the conference, like it was used as the green room at Blizzard as well or it was the conference room which was stocked with alcohol?

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We also need to consider the possibility that Cosby was an avid WoW player, and they invited him over for a weekend's worth of dank raiding and puddin' pops.

James said:

Which other discussion formats? Can you reference or link any? It just wasn't a thing in the public consciousness until very late in 2015, it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise.

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I mean it was national news when Andrea Constand originally accused him back in 2005. After Constand came forward other women did as well. They were all old stories with no evidence to support them, but they got attention. One of the early Cosby accusers was interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC "Today" in February of 2005. Another was interviewed by the Philadelphia Daily News (Beth Ferrier) and that was published in that paper back at the time. Her and yet another accuser had a big article in People magazine a month later.

There's a difference in my mind between "unknown", "viral", and "known to some people." The Cosby shit was the latter-it was known to some people. In the mid-2000s shit went "viral" (which we didn't really even use that word back then) in a very different way than it happens today, it was mostly media driven back then. A story hit some certain threshold of interest/coverage, and suddenly it was wall to wall on the three networks and the cable news networks 24/7. Remember the Elian Gonzalez shit? That was a viral news story in the "old media" era, what was mostly an uninteresting custody dispute got magnified by the Cuban American community, and then the media ran hard with it. To the point there were like 24/7 tracking of the house Elian was living in down in Florida on CNN and shit like that. The Cosby story wasn't one of those stories. The media featured it some, people didn't seem to get that excited about it, and most people seemed to like Bill Cosby. It helped that there was no hard evidence against him. The story died down.

But it still got national coverage and ink, so the idea that it was a secret is...questionable. The whole premise of Hannibal Burress's set was "Google 'Bill Cosby rape' and see all that's out there, it has more results than Hannibal Buress!" This was driven because Cosby had taken to shitting on the younger black comedians, basically saying they needed to stop cursing, pull their pants up etc, so Hannibal was throwing one back at Cos. For whatever reason, it stuck and went viral. But it was actually predicated on the fact all this information was out there, it wasn't secret.

It can get dicey when we start assuming what is "common knowledge." For example to us gaming nerds, this Blizzard drama is common knowledge. If I called my Mom up and said "hey did you hear about all the sexual harassment shit at Blizzard?" She'd be like "Blizzard? What are you talking about? Is it snowing?" I've always been a news junky, I used to play EQ in High School with the news on TV in the background. I've always skimmed most of the major papers every day, and by the mid-2000s I had a big RSS News feed I'd scroll through a few times a day. Not everyone is like that, but most people are part of some "knowledge group" where knowledge of something is very common but isn't that common to outsiders. With the Cosby stuff, where it had been on literal national network TV, I think it's safe to say it was public knowledge. It just wasn't "pervasive" public knowledge. Bill Clinton getting a blow job was pervasive public knowledge. Kelsey Grammar being a coke head was something that had been in the news, but didn't seem to affect the popularity of Frasier or his public standing. Most people if you asked them today would probably say they didn't know Grammar was a drug addict, but at the height of his career it was publicly known and posted in papers and etc.

Edit: I completely forgot to link this specifically in response to your question, the article is paywalled but worth reading if you can get by it--it's a Washington Post article from 2014 basically asking "we knew 8 years ago about these Cosby allegations, why is it just now becoming viral?" It details the national news coverage of Cosby's allegations in the mid-2000s, and speculates on why people just collectively shrugged it off: https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...d57d00-6dd0-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html

Sieger said:

I don’t think they named the room the Cosby suite because they planned to rape people in it. But saying there was zero public knowledge that Cosby was potentially a rapist until 2015 just isn’t true. Maybe that’s when a lot of you found out, but it’d been in news articles and other discussion formats for years and years.

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Exactly.

There were public allegations in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

Evernothing said:

Exactly.

There were public allegations in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

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There were multiple allegations AND a civil suit against him in 2005, the same civil suit that was later used to send him to jail. The idea that nobody knew this shit about Cosby in 2013 is laughable. Like yeah it may not have been in the news 24/7 like it was in 2014, but it wasn't some obscure thing. He was the butt of about as many jokes as Michael Jackson was at that point.

Sieger said:

It can get dicey when we start assuming what is "common knowledge."

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None of anything you wrote contradicts anything that I've been saying, and here (+ the WaPo article) you actually agree with me. It was not "common knowledge" that Bill Cosby drugged and raped women prior to 2015, and it's a huge stretch to assume that Furor went out of his way to find a subtle rape joke when we know there is nothing subtle about Furor and he never really made rape jokes. What makes more sense is that easily confused idiots are misinterpreting an inside joke (which by definition is not supposed to make sense to outside observers) because they lack a historical awareness beyond what's currently being fed to them.

Gavinmad said:

There were multiple allegations AND a civil suit against him in 2005, the same civil suit that was later used to send him to jail. The idea that nobody knew this shit about Cosby in 2013 is laughable. Like yeah it may not have been in the news 24/7 like it was in 2014, but it wasn't some obscure thing. He was the butt of about as many jokes as Michael Jackson was at that point.

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I didn't know shit about Cosby in 2013 except that black people didn't like him cause he told blacks to be responsible and raise their owns kids.

James said:

None of anything you wrote contradicts anything that I've been saying, and here (+ the WaPo article) you actually agree with me. It was not "common knowledge" that Bill Cosby drugged and raped women prior to 2015, and it's a huge stretch to assume that Furor went out of his way to find a subtle rape joke when we know there is nothing subtle about Furor and he never really made rape jokes. What makes more sense is that easily confused idiots are misinterpreting an inside joke (which by definition is not supposed to make sense to outside observers) because they lack a historical awareness beyond what's currently being fed to them.

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Well I mean I would not agree with what you were saying earlier which was basically before 2015 (which is not even the right year, Burress's set was in 2014 but it's w/e), it wasn't common knowledge. I would say tons of people knew about it, which means it's not at all unlikely some of the Blizzard crew chose to make it a joke. Is it possible it was a sweater joke? I guess, maybe. Rape jokes are pretty fucking common, so I don't fully understand how that is seen as outside the realm of possibility either. The big detracting point to the sweater joke is the pictured room has no wall patterns that look anything like a sweater, and the explanation one of them gave that it was actually a reference to the walls of a Blizzard conference room were debunked by other Blizzard people who basically said there was never any conference room like that. Making jokes about rape was fairly non-controversial until the last few years, so the idea these guys would even view it a big deal doesn't seem likely to me. People made jokes about Michael Jackson and that dude probably fucked kids. There has been a big explosion in the last few years of society shitting on any humor around these topics so it seems strange now, but "rape humor" was basically extremely normal before recent times.

I would say if you actually did a Cosby rape joke the same time he was being accused of Rape on Matt Lauer’s show which was one of the most watched shows in America, some portion of the audience would get it.

xmod2 said:

We also know the Cosby Suite wasn't a rape joke because Ghostcrawler went all diarrhea of the mouth on Twitter when shit broke and he said a) the Cosby suite was a reference to some ugly greenroom and b) the 'hot chixx' or whatever was the dude's wife/family.

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Not sure if serious but the ugly room shit is super thin and the wife excuse makes very little sense considering the rest of that group text.

It's literally the only explanation that makes sense so far, since we know that it was not a rape joke.

Foggy said:

Yes, it’s criminal. California is going to throw the company in jail.

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You do realize corporations can be held criminally liable for things correct? I get you're trying to be funny here but you're just a dumbass. They get fined they obviously don't go to jail.

Narac01 said:

You do realize corporations can be held criminally liable for things correct? I get you're trying to be funny here but you're just a dumbass. They get fined they obviously don't go to jail.

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They will shake them down for fines to float the state and Contributions to charity ngos that fill democrats coffers.