Posts made by Coin

@Arkandel said:

WHATEVER, @COIN!

I'm sorry, I'm just trying to make you accurate. It's daunting, though.

@Arkandel said:

I doubt the 'rotating roster' will really be a thing for movies, ever. I mean sure, it works in the comics but the film industry itself is based on stars who put ass to seats. RDJ does that; the guy who plays Falcon doesn't. Or Don Cheadle is a great actor (and much fun to watch in House of Cards) but he's not a megastar to base a $100 million movie on. He could, but they'll not give him the chance to do it. It's just not how Hollywood works.

House of Lies, bro.

@Arkandel
Yeah. Which is why after only two adventures, the Avengers are already being replaced by an almost entirely new team. It feels weird for a omic book lover, but when you look at the time that has gone by, it certainly computes.

@Corruption said:

@Coin said:

I also find it crucial that if people complaining, whining, and screaming at you gets them results, you should not be the person in charge of deciding stuff, because they're going to abuse the shit out of it.

Oh, I agree. That's certainly part of why I'm never staffing again. The other part is that it completely sucks the joy out of RP for me. I can't just relax and play because I get worried about stuff I need to do as staff. Another part is certainly seeing things that cannot be unseen.

Like staff's opinion of players.

Snrk. Yeah, well, we're all guilty of expressing our opinions to other people in ways that can be construed as unethical. I've been told in pages things, "just between you and me" that I found really fucking unnerving because said opinion was directly in contrast to the person's actions, and all I could do was stare at the screen and go, "WTF?" I've also slipped and said something horrible about someone on a Staff channel before.

Or the PC who used Biokinesis 5 to have 2 working penises. You just can't make that shit up.

Biokinesis doesn't work that way. It never has. This is stupid. I can make it up, and it would still be stupid.

I agree with you. At the same time, I think it is important to recognize that the intent of these movies is by and large not some sort of character development.

Let's put the cards on the table: Marvel wants to make money, Disney wants to make money, and this formula is working. People want to see all these A- and B-listers on screen shouting one-liners before fucking up some green screen monster. I think it's important to stop looking at these movies as individual products and seeing the entire franchise as one huge enormous production. Age of Ultron was pretty much entirely about the fighting, yes--but we had a Hulk movie, three Iron Man films, two Thor movies and two Captain America ones beforehand to breathe life into the characters. The movie was a climax.

If you stop watching them as individual products and see them in their entirety, it makes more sense. I'm not saying it should or that that's good, but it does.

It's just hard because there's so much time between each one.

That Robin/Rossmore clusterfuck was huge levels of stupid and I agree with Raptor that they should have both just been dropkicked right the fuck out.

I also find it crucial that if people complaining, whining, and screaming at you gets them results, you should not be the person in charge of deciding stuff, because they're going to abuse the shit out of it.

I am usually put in a weird position. Here, in my home country, I'm privileged; I'm light-skinned, descended from Italians and Spaniards for the most part. I am not a Bolivian, Paraguayan, or Peruvian immigrant or descended from them. To be explicit, they are our version of the racially/ethnically disenfranchised. When someone in my country complains about "them there peoples stealing our jobz", that's who they mean. I'm not that.

But when I lived in the U.S., I lived in San Francisco's Mission District. I hung out with cholos, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Colombians, and the sons and daughters thereof. But you know what else there was tons of in the Mission (a predominantly Hispanic area of S.F. at the time)? African and Asian-American people. Did I get along with all of them? No. But my first crush was this gorgeous Fillipino girl, and for a while I didn't have any white friends, and the people who were my friends saw me as Hispanic, because I was.

I guess what I'm getting at is that context matters so much when you're talking about racve, ethnicity, nationality, and the segregation of class though economic, racial, and ethnic delimitations. I wouldn't understand the reasoning behind the way my own country and city's segregation works if I hadn't lived on both sides. I've been called all the things and am mostly toughened against it on the outside, but it still stings, regardless of which.

Now that my verbal diarrhea is done, I have a perhaps interesting annotation to make to this thread, continuing on my train of thought regarding context:

In my country, especially in my city, like I said, the disenfranchised are Bolivians, Peruvians, and Paraguayans. We have very, very, very little black people. Most black people here are from Brazil, the Carribbean, Colombia, or actually from Africa (the majority, actually). But they are rare. I see perhaps two or three a day if I take a long bike ride through specific streets.

One time, a friend of a friend started a conversation that got me thinking, because they were talking about the Bolivians stealing jobs or whatever (some racist bullshit, he was an asshole) and after some talking I brought up these actual black people who lived among us. (Black is a very common slur here, one over which I have gotten into a lot of fights.) And I wonder why they aren't included in this complaint, in this worry. I didn't have to think about it long.

I just had to look around. There weren't that many of them. When it comes to the privileged class's fears, quantity matters. The privileged class here will never be scared of these people because they are too few, they pose no threat. But the Bolivians? The Peruvians? The Paraguayans? Holy shit, they are the Devil. Because there's enough of them. They might stop being vegetable store owners and start having money-making jobs, and wearing suits, and marrying our women, and aaaaaah, ohnoes, we're doomed.

Anyway, that's my tangent: context is king every single time. In the U.S., black people and other ethnic minorities are seen as the threat (which is also why the atrocities committed against them are so downplayed). Here, it's people of neighboring countries (and the same thing happens with atrocities committed to them here--one headline of a rag down here read: "Building catches fire, deaths include 2 people and 3 Bolivians", and I am not even fucking kidding).

Argh. Okay. Spam over. Sorry!

I think the best thing they could do right now is use Peter Parker for the movies. Once they have 3-4 Spidey movies out (and he has appeared in larger, team-based films, like he most likely will in Infinity War and whatever comes after) they should gank his ass and then make a Miles Morales Netflix series. That would be amazing.

Hopefully, the Netflix series will all hit as hard as Daredevil did, and they'll get even more of them out there. I would love to see a Runaways and Young Avengers Netflix show. Fuck, Runaways is practically designed for Netflix-style production, and if they can get enough SFX budget to do Karolina and Old Lace consistently? Fuck. Yes.

As it is, it looks like Chris Evans is so done being Captain America that he might not make it to Infinity War; it might be Bucky instead, which I am fine with. I want to see Captain Marvel and Black Panther roll up on this bitch, though. And Inhumans is so far away my brain bleeds every time I think about it, because I am a Black Bolt fanboy at heart.

@Eerie said:

@Coin said:

I am, as far as I know, the only MUer in my country. Not my city, my country. So while I cherish the friendships and connections I make with people who RP online with me, I'll never really get to experience connecting with the people who share my hobby in a face-to-face way that's anything more than temporary and transitory.

It’s funny how I feel kind of just the opposite about MU* friendships. I think if anything this is a medium that can make for particularly meaningful interactions. Like others have said, it requires a lot of time, so you’re likely to spend a good chunk of it with the same people in your group. And beyond time, I think there’s something about the nature of the internet that tends to make people say things that they probably wouldn’t if they were in the same room with people, as anyone who has been in an OOC room anywhere ever and cringed going ‘how is this person saying all this to utter strangers’ can attest to. And beyond all that, I think working on something creative with other people breeds intimacy. This may not be high art, but it is highly creative and invariably you end up putting a lot of yourself into your characters and plots. So constant exposure + open communication + creative engagement I think can really make for some fairly significant friendships. I have lots of RL friends in my immediate area and I’m pretty social, but I see my online friends more and I would even wager that ‘deep and meaningful’ conversation is more common with my online friends than my RL friends. I dunno! I’ve known @Thenomain and @Wretched for years and years at this point and I love them dearly and that was true even for the big chunks of that I wasn’t MU*ing, even though we’ve never met in person.

But none of that is mutually exclusive to what I said. I was just focusing on what is missing from those relationships, while you're focusing on the good aspects. I was saying "for every pro, there is a con" and you're saying "for every con, there is a pro".

As in multiplication, the order of the factors does not alter the product.

Despotism. I smell despotism.

Eh, considering that the actual bad guy of the film is going to be Baron Zemo, with Crossbones as his henchman, I'm guessing we're going to be seeing some heavy manipulationg or mind-control or deception or something like that.

Oh for Pete's sake.

Summary of this thread leading to this one:

[@tragedyjones wanks about Winter Soldier and the Russo Brothers.]

[@Arkandel trembles at the mere thought of @EmmahSue's wrath.]

And here we are.

You wuss.

@Roz said:

@Coin said:

@Roz said:

My therapist knows a whole lot about it now. It's alternately hilarious and frustrating the amount of background setup I have to give him just so I can talk about the actual emotional parts that's relevant to the therapy session.

Oh, man, I feel you on this so much.

"OKAY SO THERE ARE THESE THINGS CALLED PLOTS, WHICH ARE LIKE -- SPECIFIC STORY ARCS? AND THERE ARE GMS THAT RUN THEM AND IT'S REALLY HARD BUT THEN THERE'S ALSO THIS THING CALLED--" forever and ever

Me: "[...] and some people have a lot of characters. I have a bunch of them. Sometimes I play one character more than others for a time and then I switch."
Therapist: "Are all your characters the same?"
Me: "No, not at all."
Therapist: "But do they all follow the same archetype?"
Me: "Noooo, not even close."
Therapist: "This hobby of yours is highly dissociative. Not necessarily in a bad way, of course,. It's rather impressive, actually."
Me: "... you have no fucking idea."
Therapist: "Tell me."
Me: "Oh, boy..."

@tragedyjones said:

@Arkandel said:

Now, will Mage 2.0 come out out before or after Avengers 3?

Part 1 or Part 2?

Civil War.

I mean, given the cast, does anyone still really think it's going to be a Captain America film in anything but name?

@Roz said:

My therapist knows a whole lot about it now. It's alternately hilarious and frustrating the amount of background setup I have to give him just so I can talk about the actual emotional parts that's relevant to the therapy session.

Oh, man, I feel you on this so much.

Get'cho priorities straaaaaight.

@Arkandel, at the same time, we're isolated by design: we spend a lot of time in front of a computer, and while a lot of us are shut-ins, probably, many also like to have social lives.

I am, as far as I know, the only MUer in my country. Not my city, my country. So while I cherish the friendships and connections I make with people who RP online with me, I'll never really get to experience connecting with the people who share my hobby in a face-to-face way that's anything more than temporary and transitory.

Worse, we're so small that there's no real assurance that, if I did find someone who MUs in my (relative) area, I'd get along with them at all. Larger hobbies have that going for them: there's always enough people that eventually you'll make a friend through shared interest.

I'm not knocking it, I'm just saying: for every pro there's a con.

This is my primary hobby, so at least my monetary sink is very low, yes. Good thing, too, I'm not exactly rollin' in it.

@Chime said:

Actually, I know some pretty entertaining Urban Fantasy / Paranormal Romance that... well, explores that. (Not the race questions, but focusing on the adventures of a female demon...) Check out Debra Dunbar's Imp series. Most entertaining.

Ugh, you and yours with the getting me to read that damn book series.

(Is the next one out yet?)

@tragedyjones said:

As the least sane of us know, staffing is a challenge. Being a Headwiz, even more so. But tonight while talking to a girl I am seeing, who is not a MUer, or even a gamer, and who was only fairly sure she had a vague idea what D&D was, I tried to explain my stress.

ME: Ok so. I explained I run an online game of sorts yes?

THEM:Yes

ME: Because that is where I met my friend from (referring to meeting another player for dinner a few days ago)

THEM: Following so far lol

ME: Right now there are 21 people logged in, we have about 50 players of varying levels of activity
ME: The hobby is VERY time intensive. An average session can be 2-8 hours, with 2-3 probably average
ME: I do NOT have that kind of time except maybe once or twice a month, I may play twice a month
ME: But I am responsible for the fun of dozens of peoiple and that can be exhausting

THEM: I mean I don't fully understand that in that context but i understand the being responsible for people's fun aspect

ME: Right. Also many of the people in this hobby - which is a niche of a niche - have issues
ME: Drama and interpersonal conflicts are not uncommon, and I am the resolution system

THEM: Issues that don't allow them to realize this is just a hobby and not your life (or theirs)?

ME: Depends on the person lol
ME: Also, as all things in life, it gets even better when sex is involved

THEM: I'm a little perplexed with how sex is involved lol

ME: Well, it is a social activity and any social activity can involve flirtation, first of all
ME: Second, ugh, I am going to feel so nerdy.
ME: The entire way the game is played is basically colaborative fiction
ME: And that OFTEN leads to people collaboratively describing their charactersf ucking

THEM: I see lol

ME: And some people have a hard time detaching reality and fiction
ME: RIGHT NOW we are at a very low drama cycle, but I still feel responsible for making all the things happen
ME: Also with your permission can I share this conversation, identifiers removed, with my friends who will be amused at how I am trying to make this make sense to a complete outsider?

THEM: That sounds like a pain in the ass. This is part of the reason I think I have no passion for anything lol

THEM:Of course lol

THEM: And you don't even need to remove identifiers, I don't care lol

And yet you chose to call her a 'them'. TSK.

Also, lolz, yeah, this is basically how it goes when I talk about MUing with my therapist, except she and I go way deeper into how it affect me, you guys, and world peace than this.

Also, I pay her, and we don't get to do sex stuff before or after.