Posts made by Arkandel

@surreality said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

It's the rest of us that need answers, and they're hard to come to if 'if you accept this at all, you just want to demean women RL and call people offensive slurs right and left' or 'you just want the world rewritten to bubble wrap your personal sensibilities and everyone is sensitive to something' are the only positions people recognize as participants in the discussion.

If this thread has a point at all it is to at least allow the conversation to be had, and see what - if any - restraints are sufficient to both allow for some interesting depictions of real world issues while not making the same setting essentially unplayable for those who have faced a form of discrimination in their own real lives.

I am not even sure if it's fair to call for understanding from both 'sides' of this (to the extent there are sides). Some of us simply happen to be on the more privileged side of the social fence, and that's a difficult signal to override.

Double post but...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bully-sucker-punched-man-cerebral-162451893.html

Daaaamn dude. There's being a complete asshole and then there's being a complete asshole.

We recently realized Rogers has been adding a $11 charge to our monthly bills for almost a year now for 'home tech support'. I didn't ask for it (and since I was the one on the phone when we upgraded the bandwidth plan I'd remember it being even mentioned, let alone agreed on), and I definitely didn't need it, but there it was!

The representative gave a $15 discount to get rid of me when I got on a chat to yell at them. Gee, thanks. I guess you guys get to pocket the rest (I'm not actually mad at that person, it's not his fault but...)

I hate having to be in a state of constant vigilance with my own services, dammit. We shouldn't have to be breaking down every bill to see if someone's trying to get something by us.

I don't want to necessarily argue this applies to us, but here's a passage from Fahrenheit 451 I came across on a book subreddit.

"Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.""

What do you think?

@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.

I am often frustrated by the same thing. In games we kill hordes of enemies without the social stigma, right?

However that's my emotional response. My brain chips in to re-inform me that murder, as a whole, is pretty much universally condemned. Sexism or racism are alive and well everywhere around us.

It's way easier to be triggered by something that has actually happened to you or someone you know. But how does that relate to gaming when that's just an IC point of view not shared by players? Well, that's what this thread is about.

@tragedyjones I heard they just fired the Supergirl director (or I guess one of them?) for sexual misconduct.

@lisse24 said in Good TV:

I've been watching Manhunt on Netflix.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/justice-league-edits-joss-whedon-micromanaged-zack-snyder

I'm using two headsets.

One is an Mpow Cheetah; cheap as hell (something like $30? from amazon.ca, probably way cheaper for the USAians), the battery is decent for what it is... good for sports, light, feels secure behind the ears. I like I can easily put it away in my coat pocket and forget about it until I need it, too, the damn thing is so compact.

My other set was a Christmas present but Bose Soundlink II was a pretty decent low/midrange headset. Way more comfortable, the battery is amazing and it sounds way better. But it's not as secure for sportsy stuff - anything other than a brisk walk wouldn't be too great.

Contact lenses sometimes feel icky and irritate my eyes. My monthlies were fine yesterday and they may be fine tomorrow, but today they're sandpaper on my eyeballs.

@kanye-qwest said in Good or New Movies Review:

@auspice Gotta confess, this trailer was p boring. I'm concerned about this movie because it's SO MANY characters. I'll see it. But so far, so meh.

GASP how dare you. I got chills.

@mietze There are several charities where people climb the CN Tower for charity. Climbing 147 floors is not an effortless thing at all.

I mean I get it, it's inspirational and for a good cause, but every year there are people who have no business trying it with zero preparation behind it. The first 20 floors or so - every time - are just packed with folks leaning against walls unable to move until they can move to where the paramedics can bail them or just throwing up. Pulled muscles are far from rare, too... there are a bunch of ambulances on the standby, every time, and not just as a precaution.

It's great to have goals and setting the bar high. But dammit, don't just wake up one morning and go for it, prepare just a little bit first. Go up and down our own building's stairs first, take a long walk... see where you're at.

@mietze said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

When my practice included a lot of athletes I met quite a few who caused injury over time by trying to force stretches prior to workouts and where the muscle wasn’t warmed up.

I don't have the same kind of exposure to actual athletes but it drives me to sigh when I see working grunts in our weekly soccer games either show up and go right into a full game without any sort of warming up first - and those are folks sitting in front of a computer all day, sometimes a good bit out of shape - or going into these half-acrobatic kinds of static hip and calf stretches they've seen athletes do on TV.

I am very reluctant to offer unrequested advice to anyone (it's just a no-no), but when the fuckers ask I provide it, and then they don't follow it.

@faceless said in RL Anger:

We really need a RL Mildly Disgruntled thread. The majority of what I post in this thread isn't really anger so much as eye-twitching annoyance... anyway!

Yeah the thread's title always seemed needlessly aggressive to me. Few things make me angry but lots of them peeve me.

@thenomain said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

Utopia shouldn't mean boring, we're just not creative enough for them. Just like the people who think "Lawful Good" means "stick up their bum".

That is correct. However consider that Star Trek is built around this premise; it's supposed to show us humanity at its best, or at least at a point of its history where they've (we're?) conquered many chronic social issues, and live in a society mostly free of racism, sexism, money-chasing, etc.

But let's say you're setting a game in the fifties (or the Victorian age) and you're trying to be at least somewhat historically accurate. It's quite feasible even then to accept or even to require PCs to be more liberal in their outlooks; certainly there were plenty of individuals back then who didn't look at a free black man or a self assured woman as a bad thing, but societies as a whole did. Doing away with those parts ("in our version of London all races are equal") can still be done of course, it's simply not the same thing.

Can it be creative? Damn right it can be. You can create alternative settings of just about anything and make them a blast. Utopia isn't the problem, a lack of vision is; if you change one major aspect of life then you need to chase those alterations down their rabbit holes to see where they lead, and see how you can turn the outcome into something fun. So there's no racism in your city - awesome! What happened to slavery? Did the United States still have a civil war? What was Britain's role?

And the biggest question... what does that all mean to the actual RP you will do in the game? It's not about just being able to use Michael B. Jordan as your PB, it has to all make sense as a whole. Which takes a bit of work.

@bored If I had an answer I'd tell you.

My best guess so far is to appeal to people's sense of fairness, and ask them to not do to other people what they wouldn't tolerate themselves.

Maybe that means I'm being naive. It's what I have though.

@miss-demeanor said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@arkandel So will there at any point be a more punitive action taken against anyone that sees fit to drag Hog Pit nonsense into the rest of the forum? I mean, obviously I opted into the Hog Pit so I don't mind it nearly as much as those that called for it to be made opt-in only. But it seems rather silly to have had that huge discussion about it, complete with its own shit-flinging and arguments, and gone to all the bother of making it so... if people are just going to drag it right back out into the rest of the forum.

Yeah, I agree. Ganymede's Law will take care of the written part of the rules when that's ready, and we do plan to have a 'gray zone' that sits between Constructive and the Hog Pit for reviews and the such, as well. And I do want some of the targeted group actions ("we don't like you in particular, person, so everything you say will be attacked on sight!") to stop. Dogpiling is definitely on my radar as well.

What I'm kinda pleased about is that folks from all sides of these arguments seem equally pissed off at times. It probably means something's being done right.

@mietze said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Should I assume you were telling me to shut up

Just to be clear, I wouldn't have made a thread like this if I wanted people to shut up. It's kiiind of a meta-discussion to talk about a forum on the forum, but I think some good points can still be made.

Personally I much prefer threads about characters, discrimination in games or kitten armies. But I understand this stuff is important to (some of) you, and so I'm trying to take input and respond as much as I can. For starters an excellent point was made earlier on about getting defensive and circling the wagons when people disagreed with administrative decisions, and I cut that shit out... for the most part.

@wolfs said in Regarding administration on MSB:

People are used to zero moderation whatsoever and there's a bit of a push against it now that things are changing a little bit, perhaps as if they fear it's going to lead to further moderation and tighter rules when Arkandel himself has already made it pretty clear that's of no interest to him here. This sort of nitpicking over what Auspice did also shows little faith in Arkandel's ability to handle things himself, whether the people pointing the finger of blame here realize that or not.

I mean I could handle things myself, but I don't want to. What's even more important, you (all) don't want me to.

The whole point of having conspirators, other of course than sharing the workload, is that I wouldn't be the single authorit-ah around here. I want Ganymede's NUKE'EM FROM ORBIT approach, not because I usually agree with it but because I don't. I want Auspice's empathy and viewpoint because when left to my own devices I really have few shits to give, and that requires a counter.

We are not a hivemind - by design. We are different people. We see things differently. That's okay, it's MSB in a nutshell; with how many of you have I disagreed with in all sorts of topics, on all kinds of issues? How many of you were mad at me at some point? Because I assure you, there have been several who've made me squint over the last few years.

I don't expect or want us to be a kumbaya-kind of forum. That's not who we are. All I want is for us to be able to disagree vehemently with each other and still be able to coexist. In that way and no other I don't want this place to be my-way-or-the-highway; we're not a MUSH. To me the ability to stick together even when we don't like each other very much is the reason this place exists.

@deadculture I've zero issues with @Tempest, with whom I've played before.

I just don't want to spend all this time nitpicking minor stuff. I got dank memes to post.