Posts made by Derp

@Wizz said:

@Derp said:

@Wizz said:

I am going to 100% guarantee you that no one has thrown a bottle at your head or screamed a racial slur at you for just trying to buy groceries. Or just for walking down the street. No one has denied you fucking housing, or told you or your partner to leave a public area because you held hands.

I think my partner, Will, would disagree with you. Racial slurs, no, I'll grant you that much, but race isn't the only category that happens in. But sure, let's turn that into a race war, instead of shitty humans being shitty.

Genuinely my bad for assuming. But you're absolutely right, it's not the only category, and you then have the experience to know that. That's what we're talking about here, is that being white and a dude means that you are shielded from so much bullshit. It's crazy to not admit to it, for real

@Derp said:

The whole thrust of your argument is "Affirmative Action is bad!" Yeah, maybe. It's a gray area. You had to struggle a little harder to get into school? Aww man.

And if I were a black person being denied scholarships based on the color of my skin? Would that be outrage-worthy? If we're going to talk equality instead of revenge, then at what point do we actually step up and start saying that it shouldn't happen to anyone?

You weren't "denied" a scholarship for being white, you didn't qualify for the scholarships that exist. That maybe sounds pedantic, but it's an important difference, because (in part) Affirmative Action was a response to systematic denial of service, extreme cultural inequity. And again, I'm not saying that in some senses Affirmative Action has been taken to an extreme in some interpretations, or that it's some sort of permanent solution to the problem. You're not arguing with anyone here, so far anyway.

But you're arguing both sides of it here, which is a relatively common thing in these circles. You can't say 'you don't qualify for X thing based on your race and that's okay' by backing it up with 'being white shields you from so much other bullshit that it just balances'. The same could be said for the other side, in that there are inherent advantages to the color of your skin and things that white people have to deal with that people of other races are legally shielded from.

And that's why this argument bugs the hell out of me. Everyone just assumes that it only goes one way, when it doesn't. It's just that one side isn't allowed to talk about the hardships that they endure based on it because people from our distant past made some bad calls, and now we're forced to live with the stigma of it because society won't tolerate any deviance from the mea culpa routine. We inherited a cross to bear, and any sign of wanting to shrug that off is simply not tolerated, and words like 'racist' get thrown around before anyone even asks 'why?'

We're not equal to each other, sure. I can get behind that. But one side is not universally more disadvantaged than another, either. We're unequal in different ways. In that sense, I guess we are sort-of equal in the sense that we each get handed some bullshit in areas we shouldn't be handed bullshit in, but until the bar is set at a position where everyone can reach it at the same damn level across the board, granting more special stuff to one side is ludicrous, and pretending that whitey has his boot on everyone's neck is shortsighted to the point of lunacy.

(FWIW, this is the same reason that I disagree with Obergefell. Yes, let's create another class of citizens to grant special legal statuses to rather than just saying something as simple as 'marriage as a legal institution makes no sense, so we're going to simply say that any two adults who wish to enter a domestic partnership can, under simple contract law, and leave this term 'marriage' to mean whatever people want it to mean for them'. Because insulating one group never breeds hostility or causes problems, and there's no way we'll be facing any future backlash from that. Right?)

@Wizz said:

I am going to 100% guarantee you that no one has thrown a bottle at your head or screamed a racial slur at you for just trying to buy groceries. Or just for walking down the street. No one has denied you fucking housing, or told you or your partner to leave a public area because you held hands.

I think my partner, Will, would disagree with you. Racial slurs, no, I'll grant you that much, but race isn't the only category that happens in. But sure, let's turn that into a race war, instead of shitty humans being shitty.

The whole thrust of your argument is "Affirmative Action is bad!" Yeah, maybe. It's a gray area. You had to struggle a little harder to get into school? Aww man.

And if I were a black person being denied scholarships based on the color of my skin? Would that be outrage-worthy? If we're going to talk equality instead of revenge, then at what point do we actually step up and start saying that it shouldn't happen to anyone?

EDIT: This originally ended with an insult and that's not appropriate. I am really sorry.

S'cool. I'm pretty thick skinned. I fall into at least one minority group that's taken a lot of fire, and I have some quesionable political views of my own. I'm used to things getting heated.

@Wizz said:

Dude, I really am sorry because in my experience it's not something that you can be told and you have to wait until you see it for yourself, but you really fucking are. I know people tell you this until they're blue in the face and I know you're probably sick of it, but if you're not aware that just being a white dude gives you some inherent advantages, it's just because you lack the life experience to know better, which to be honest is kind of a blessing in itself in a weird way.

Full disclosure, I am a white dude myself, but a lot of my immediate and extended family isn't and once it's there in your face you can't un-see it.

See, I'm going to have to call bullshit on this. Being a white dude has never, ever given me any sort of special advantage. If anything, it's been detrimental to me in a number of ways, because I don't qualify for some of the things that I otherwise would if I were of a different race, gender, or ethnicity.

But please, prove me wrong. Tell me how being white has bettered me in some way above and beyond my peers? People make a lot of empty assumptions, especially about the lives of others, without any sort of actual basis for it outside of 'well the media told me it's a thing, so it has to be true'.

I'm not financially better off than anyone else. I fall well below the poverty line. I'm not academically better off than anyone else, save in situations where I've worked my fucking ass off to get there, devoting upwards of sixteen hours a day to school, and everything I've managed to do has been on student loans and pell grants, plus whatever I can scrape by working the minimum-wage job for the school I managed to land because I work my ass off academically.

But yeah, I'm just ballin' based on nothing more than the color of my skin. So go on, show everyone how.

@Cirno said:

I am sick unto death of people telling me about how white people are being browbeaten, which is not a fucking thing and never was.

This really is a thing, though. It's just more subtle than people give it credit for. I'm a single white male, and I didn't think it was a thing either.

Until I started college.

All the scholarships that my parents could have had, or that I could have had if I had gone ten years ago? Gone. Giving money to single white males based on academics alone is socially taboo now. All the groups that are supposed to support students? Good luck trying to sit through one of those as a white guy without someone glaring daggers at you, including the people who are supposedly there to help. Don't you dare voice any of your actual opinions, rather than regurgitate what people tell you to, especially not as a polisci major. You will be cast out into the wilderness of academia, and your grades will start to mysteriously suffer. There is so much talk of "white privelege" it's ridiculous, even among people of different races that I went to school with, whose parents made more money than I did. They still accuse me of getting a better education than them, of having better things than they did (which is wholly laughable). Everything. Note, we went to the same school, had the same teachers, one of them even lived in the same part of town that I did -- in a house twice as big, and they got better grades than me.

The sheer saturation of this idea is astounding to me. Just because you're white doesn't mean you're somehow better off. That's rarely the case until you get up into talking about people with 9-digit savings accounts, and lots of those are just old money.

The law made us all equal decades ago, and in fact managed to grant a few groups special status by specifically declaring them "no touchy", but it seems like equality isn't what people are actually wanting. It's starting to sound an awful lot like people don't want equality so much as revenge for something that happened well before any of us were even born.

And the sad fact is, it's working. Thus all the spark-ups of outrage, etc. Where does that leave us, as a country?

@Cirno said:

Ah, yes - the Day WORA Failed.

It can only be surpassed by the time BetterJudgment failed.

He taunted me by saying I would not open a game.

With @Alzie's help, I opened a game.

He failed hard. He was, as they say, pwnt.

I challenge you to rephrase this into a haiku.

@Coin said:

I don't know. It might take another two movies, but I have the feeling Finn and Rey are destined to be together. We'll never see'em bang it out, obvs, but I think they'll end up together.

Or did you mean actual depicted sex when you said "coupling"?

Lol, no, I meant 'becoming a couple'. I didn't realize at that moment what else it could mean. And maybe Finn and Rey, sure, but I think that one's less likely. Luke in the movies so far has been a Jedi traditionalist, and they believe that emotion leads to the dark side, thus how Anakin fell etc, etc. She might fall into the 'no touchy' category. So far the only Jedi we've seen be in a relationship (in the movies, mind you -- Mara Jade is still <3) was Anakin, and love of Padme drove him to atrocity and desperation and all that. I think there would be a nerd eruption if a Jedi shacked up with someone.

@Cirno said:

Poe and Finn are both guys, so it's doubly likely not to happen.

Yeah, I know. They really do make a cute couple.

@Cirno said:

It makes me very sad that this did not actually happen. They make such a cute couple.

It's Disney. Interracial couplings will not be happening on the big screen. Just on their own private channel. We're still far too conservative for all that. Give it twenty more years.

@Arkandel said:

At this point though I think the galaxy would be safer if they just sterilized every damn Skywalker around. Man do they have a tendency to get a lot of people murdered until they figure their shit out.

Amen to that.

@Thenomain said:

Belatedly, I object strongly to not being considered one of the wizards that made the game work, when it was moving. I did almost as much to make the game more playable, more enjoyable, after it opened as before. I made decisions. I managed, and I did jobs. I may not have told stories, but I worked so closely with those who did on a day to day basis that I was a strong reason why they were more effective than they would have been otherwise.

This is absolutely true. Theno's job, like most coders, might not have been highly visible, but none of this would have been possible without him. He put together endless systems, fixed endless bugs, and more than that he was there to help guide us through what we were doing through his own experience. I had to ask Theno for tons and tons of help, and he was always incredibly patient, even when I was being impatient and irritating (as I have a strong tendency to be). He absolutely deserves a ton of credit. He went slogging through the muckiest parts of the mess to make sure the rest of it was shining and pristine. He was Scotty to @Coin's Kirk -- things would have fallen apart without him.

@Warma-Sheen said:

BB-8's missing piece of Luke's location supposedly matches 'no known charted space', then ends up to be an unaltered, fairly large section right in the middle of the known galaxy somewhere near the mid to outer rim. They couldn't even do some visual flip or refraction on the image to give it some type of encrypted value to explain why it wasn't recognized initially? Seems lazy, but ultimately forgivable.

Well, let's not forget that space is big. Like, unbelievably big. So big, in fact, that it's doubtful they've explored even a fraction of the stars in that galaxy, and probably just use the ones that are major landmarks for their stellar cartography in much the same way that we do for maps of the milky way. Advanced technology or not, there is only so much of space that a handful of species can conceivably explore in a finite amount of time. Assuming that their galaxy is on par with the Milky Way, even if they explored one million new stars every year, it would take them a hundred thousand years to chart and explore every star in the galaxy, so the fact that the section of the map they had didn't match any known system is rather conceivable. If you take a map consisting of a hundred billion dots and look at just a part of it at a really close scale, and then think of all the possible ways to get from dot A to dot B all the way over on the other side of the map -safely-, then that's not really a stretch at all.

@Warma-Sheen said:

The writing was on the mall only about a month or two after it opened.

I think that I would ultimately have to disagree with this. From a staff perspective, we had a lot of plans and a lot of activity months after the game opened, and a hell of a lot of player ST's putting tons of effort into things. It very much had a good run.

If not for Sinister, it probably would have folded a long time ago.

While I appreciate this thought, I can't take credit for this at all. I had a lot of help and a lot of support from @Coin and @Thenomain, as well as @Cobaltasaurus and others. I was far from the only staffer -- in fact, I mainly focused just on the werewolf side of things, while Cobalt handled vampire and Deviant and I split up the tasks for Demon. I might have been the most visible of these people, but I was hardly the only one, and they deserve as much credit for keeping it going.

@TNP said:

Having one of the 2 wizards (not counting Theno/code staff) go AWOL was a pretty clear indicator that it was in trouble.

See, this also isn't exactly how this went down. They didn't go AWOL, we were perfectly aware they were heading out and dealing with RL school stuff. I'm a student myself, and I've been struggling just as hard, but she's a Master's student, and that's a ton of work -- far too much to keep up with a MU, truth be told. That's a lesson that we've all learned through this -- the best laid plans, etc. RL is a bitch sometimes, and though there was a distinct plan in place that I was proud to be a part of making a reality, sometimes things just don't work out.

This was mostly a timing issue for all of us. It's not just one person. All of us have had conflicts come up. Laying at the feet of one person is really unfair to her.

I finally got to see it. I have to agree. It was bloody awesome. I was so worried they were gonna bomb it, but they really pulled through.

Although, goddamn, Carrie got old.

@Thenomain said:

@Derp said:

@Thenomain said:

We could call the game a Mud, for starters.

But I've never played one of those, so I have no point of reference!

You know The ANSI color vomit I complain about? Imagine a game where the way Soapbox treats plain text as code and colorizes it is an accepted thing, to the point where a game can advertise "partial coloring" in a personal description as a selling point. This is a Mud.

True story, by the way.

That sounds godawful. And people actually play on this?

@Coin said:

@Derp said:

@Coin

I'm so jealous, you bastard.

Sooooooooo gooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

You're so mean.

@Coin

I'm so jealous, you bastard.

@thebird said:

Sick on vacation.
Like, 101+ degree fever on vacation. Both my dad and I are so sick. This is so lame... At least I waited toward the end to get sick.
Buh... I want my own bed. And my own cold medicine. And my own house.

That's why they tell you to never drink the water!

@Thenomain said:

We could call the game a Mud, for starters.

But I've never played one of those, so I have no point of reference!

@Wizz said:

PbP games will prove you so, so horribly wrong.

Hey, I never said it had to be a play by post game. Personally I'd make a drinking game out of it.

@Coin said:

Hm? The colors on those posts are from the code here on the forums, not on the game.

To be fair, we could probably put up posts in those colors, though that would raise a few questions about our intentions in doing so. And even more, given that some of it is in italics.

Could be a fun game though!

@Thenomain said:

It's important to clarify that we're not giving the game to Sinister, but he has agreed to maintain it in a kind of status-quo. He knows that if he goes too far, Deviant (neé @Coin) will ask me to pull the plug. We're all on-board with this, and we'd much rather let people dork around than slamming the doors closed to the people who are still logging in.

edit: Yes, he has a Wizbit now. It would have been unreasonable and inappropriate to ask someone to maintain a game without one. He doesn't have any of the magic passwords. @Coin does but he keeps losing and forgetting them, like a forgetful landlord, leaving me, the head of repairs and improvements, to hold all the keys. Some people's children, I swear.

Correct. I'm still there to act as a caretaker, but I won't be approving any new characters, making changes to anything, etc. I'm just there to make sure that the things people need to have done are getting done, and they can continue to tell the stories they want to tell for as long as Deviant leaves the lights on. So don't worry, I'm not going to go crazy and make big changes or anything like that. It's still @Coin's game, and he's the one calling the shots. So for any who think that this is their big break and want to bend my ear for stuff, sorry. For those of you who want to continue telling the stories you've started until you find a nice place to wrap it all up, I'm here for you.