Posts made by Ataru

So I came across this trailer recently ....

https://youtu.be/KhjQyDMzKWI

So anyone who knows me knows I am an Agatha Christie nut and in particular a fan of Hercule Poirot. Now I have my favourite version of "Murder on the Orient Express" and that is David Suchet's. He really brought the pathos and faith crisis of Poirot on to the screen like no one else. This looks like an amazing cast, and while I'm a fan of Brannagh, I'm not sure how he'll do as the "Belgium detective". Here's hoping. If you've never seen, by the way, David Suchet's version of this story, it is Season 12, Episode 3 of his series.

The whole series is an absolute masterpiece of TV and that episode as well as the last season (season 13) is some of the finest TV ever made.

@Misadventure It is a great city. I loved growing up there and worked at Seattle Opera for awhile. But I'll say what I've always said to people ... either know someone there ahead of time or expect to work at making friends. Granted there are so many people there who are people who have moved there, its probably rather different now than it was back in the 90s. Sparks might be able to help with how it is now.

@HelloProject said in RL Anger:

@Ataru So what you're saying is that Seattle is how I feel about all these goddamned gentrifying hipsters who are ruining my city and acting like they're entitled to push us out because they have money.

Yeah pretty much ... but it has less to do with who has money or hipstery stuff or race or anything ... it just has to do with native Seattlites having an elite attitude about being native Seattlites. Its a very closed community and they are relatively outnumbered by people who have moved there over the last few decades. I'm not saying they're necessarily snobbish ... its more just a latent resentment.

@Kanye-Qwest I remember showing my parents the Big Lebowski and first my mom said to my dad, "Its your brothers ..." and then he said, "Its like watching a documentary about southern California."

@mietze I meet so many people who either moved to Seattle back when it got cool to move to Seattle (20ish years ago), moved more recently, are thinking of moving, etc etc etc.

I will tell you a private little secret from a native Seattlite who has been away from it long enough that I don't give a shit that I'm sharing the secret anymore.

Native Seattlites (I'm talking about the people who are multi-generational ... and I mean like really really native Seattlites ... pre-1980s before there was even a whiff of coolness to the city) will always detest anyone and everyone else who comes to their city. They probably won't show it overtly because it is an obsessively polite culture (you can sometimes spot native Seattlites by their almost off-putting politeness), but believe me its there. The sense that the Emerald City is or was their paradise (and it was) before the rabble started coming because 'hey, Seattle is so cool'. For them, prices went up, development spread across what was pristine land, gang violence actually became a thing rather than some fantasy that happened elsewhere (well, minus the Yokuza or Russian mafia, but they they politely did their thing in their little enclaves). None of it was good. Sure, they'll talk about how wonderful the big Seattle boom is ... publically ... but seriously, they resent every single person who moved to their city post about 1990. Its not a racial thing or a class thing or any of the other identity things. Its just a matter of watching their city be one thing and then become another (granted their view of Seattle before all of this is with rose-tinted glasses, but reality isn't important when it comes to perception).

There's a reason why for a long time there was a posterboard on the I-5 heading into Seattle that had a picture of a blonde-bikini clad woman that read, "Californians go home, we don't want you."

Whenever I've had friends talk about moving to Seattle, I have always warned them ... make sure you know someone. Have some connection to someone before you go. Because native Seattlites are very closed community. They'll be polite, but they won't open their circles to you. Now this has probably changed now that the non-natives outnumber the natives. I haven't been back to my native city in some time and as much as I love the climate, I came to loathe the place.

I'll paraphrase a comment my mom once made about her native California, "Its the most beautiful piece of land on God's green Earth, unfortunately the Seattlites live there."

I hope she is alright @Pondscum .

I'm leaving London shortly. Waiting for my train. It's been a tense weekend.

Also yes Fuck You IS.

waves hand I am not the Ataru you're looking for.

Everyone's advice has been very good so far. I would add that especially at the beginning KNOW your Staff. They don't have to be friends. You've been in the community for awhile. You know the people to a degree. Know who you are hiring. Be proactive and ask people whom you feel you'll be able to trust with the opening of your game. As your game progresses, this can change as you meet new people on your game and maybe bring them on to staff. But even then ... know them. And don't put anyone in any real power on your game whom you can't trust implicitly to make the right decision should you not be there.

Crypt and Aether are two of the games I played of which I have the fondest memories.

Former Aetherite (played Orman Kai and Rani Rajan) and CryptMUX player (played Ortrud, Old Meg and the fae, Decay)

@Auspice There are many many examples that one could find of this. That was rather a public one. So was the one where students who were Classics majors protested learning Ovid's Metamorphosis because it had rape in it. Guess what ... you're a Classics major. Deal. I'm a rape victim. I studied Classics. I dealt. If you can't deal, find something else.

its the many instances that don't get reported, that are ignored by the media and just allowed to happen with no fanfare. For every instance like that you see in a journal, there are a hundred more happening elsewhere.

@Paris said in RL Anger:

It's annoying as hell that overzealous students have co-opted the term, but it is really useful when correctly used to describe a very real set of interactions.

This right here. That is the important difference. Microaggressions like you describe are valid, should be recognized and where they can be resolved, resolved.

The way it is co-opted in academia is really what I was focusing on. I have friends whose academic lives, careers they have poured years into (and anyone who has done a PhD knows exactly what kind of sacrifices that means) have had their lives ruined and careers ended because some kid didn't like the way they said "He/She" or some bullshit like that. And the thing is these kids are not going to listen to us to correct them. I don't know who they will listen to really. All I do know is that in their millenial adolescence at college, they are leaving a trail of ruined lives and destroying the whole purpose of academia. /golf-clap.

@Meg said in RL Anger:

Also to throw this out there, I've very rarely ever needed to refer to someone by their race. What context are you all (ambiguous term) running into this that it's becoming such a big issue that you can't just /not/ call someone an Asian?

Mostly, they like to be called their names.

I'm actually with you here ... unfortunately young students today define themselves more by their various identities than their names. That's not hyperbole.

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

I'm not with you on whether I should or should not be offended by an antiquated term leveled against me in a manner that is clearly disparaging. How I deal with being offended is another matter: in this case, I looked to the judge, who threatened the party with contempt of court if he used that term again.

You mean the term Oriental? When did I say this wasn't an offensive term? It is, categorically, when describing a person.

If you mean Asian ... that's not an antiquarian term (as in not out of date), nor has a history of being used in a derogatory manner and refers to region not ethnicity. If you, as an Asian, want to be offended by it. Okay. Tell me what you want to be called, if anything. I won't call you Asian, but you're not going to convince me that it is a derogatory term period. You may be offended by it ... great ... I've never had an Asian friend who was.

I'll just end with this for now....

"For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St. Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the end of the last evening."
—G.K. Chesterton

Its not lack of empathy ... its the way it has destroyed academic pursuit and freedom of thought. There are healthy ways of discussing these topics (and re: Oriental, I am aware that that term is not new and its history). The way they are talked aboutt is not healthy. And I don't mean on just a "gosh, people get so sensitive and angry about this" ... I mean on a level of professors, teachers and students whose lives are being ruined, jobs lost, careers destroyed, because Sally the Pink-Haired SJW decided that the way you talked about the history of that Oriental rug was just so fucking triggering that they "felt the violence of that microaggression and gosh they just couldn't leave their room for days because they were crying". THESE PEOPLE NEED TO SERIOUSLY FUCK OFF. And they need to be told, not just by academics like me, but by people like you to GET A GRIP.

@Ganymede I do use the terms correctly. I've managed to make it through my decades without offending anyone with racial terms. Amazing. What offends me is people creating new and interesting ways of being offended. The whole "Microaggressions exist within a context of power binary" ... actually fuck off. That kind of stupid shit is what is making academia a toxic, poisonous pool of immature stupidity.

To be honest, my heated response is only because I'm a middle-aged reasonable Gen-Xer immersed in academia ... the hot bed of this stupid shit. The war wounds are real with microaggression stupidity.

FFS.... I can't remember the last time someone used the word 'oriental' to describe a person. I think most anyone under an age knows not to use the word. Its used for objects, period. And anyone who does use it incorrectly are easily corrected.

As for Asian ... yeah its used to describe people from Asia. So what? It has nothing to do with ethnicity or culture. Its about coming from a continent. And in everyday speech, I've always heard people refer to Indians as Indians, South-east Asians as ... wait for it ... South-east Asians, and Pacific Asians as Pacific Asians. Generally the only people who are referred to just as Asian are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, or those South-east Asian countries where there are a lot of those ethnicities (like the Phillipines or Signapore and the like). Its not meant as an insult, has never been an insult and to fabricate it as one in today's stupidly hyper-sensitive world of microaggression idiocy is just annoying.

Lemme guess .. you call white people white ALL THE TIME. Well fuck you for being so insensitive with your microaggression.

People need to fucking chill out and KNOW IN CONTEXT when a term being used to describe them is being used as an insult or not. 95% of the time, its not. Chill.

PS: These meds are turning me into Bea Arthur.

I'm an extremely forgiving, give someone a second chance, type of person. And when/if the Dune game ever opened, there are many people I'd welcome on it that I may have issues with (though to be fair after 25+ years in this mix, I haven't really made an enemy). But I can categorically say the VASpider is one person I would absolutely not allow on the game and if she appeared and I was informed it was her, she'd be out. No chances or fucks given. I don't really see a thread like this as a witch hunt (though to be fair it could easily turn into something worse, so you know ... lets pay attention to what we're saying), but I'm not going to feel bad if its dump on VASpider thread. She obviously chose to reenter the community on FH. She can deal with the repercussions of that, including this thread which she might never see.