Best posts made by GreenFlashlight

I remember about ten years ago, I was looking into joining a Legend of the Five Rings MUSH. Wasn't actually a MUSH--I think it was on some kind of chat program?--but it seemed to function enough like a MUSH that I didn't mind calling it that. I built a courtier and was chatting with some people in a pre-launch soft RP session, when I noticed that I was the only courtier. Literally everyone else was a bushi or a shugenja.

I asked why that was, and I was told straight to my face with refreshing honesty, "Because bushi and shugenja can roleplay talking, but courtiers can't roleplay fighting."

At first, it was fun for me to speculate about how little is going on in his life that this is the only avenue by which he can feel powerful. Then I thought about it seriously, and I just kind of feel sorry for him. Like, can you imagine being such a loser that dodging bans on a make-pretend game is how you feel powerful? You just know he's the kind of person who would put kittens in metal trash cans and light fires under them except he's afraid the cat would scratch him up.

EDIT: Actually, no, a kitten torturer isn't quite right. You know who he really reminds me of? Hank's friend Dermott from the Venture Brothers.

@ZombieGenesis said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Strangers who come up to me while I'm in a store, minding my own business, put their hands on me(on my shoulder) and say "I feel so sorry for you" because I choose to wear a mask in public.

If that is not legal grounds to rabbitpunch the person in the throat, then it bloody well should be.

@Cupcake said in Tips for not wearing out your welcome:

Any time you are in any kind of conversation with someone where you feel like they are being negative toward you and you legitimately aren't sure, or your initial, instant reaction is to extract the worst from what they've said, stop and calmly explain that sometimes you have difficulty processing people's tone, and could they please clarify their intention? If they are in fact hostile they'll make no bones about telling you, but I can promise you, nine out of ten times? They're not.

I agree this is a good approach, so I'm not trying to contradict it, but I do think it's important to disclaim that no tip about communication is universally applicable (including the one I'm about to give), so it's a good idea to build a broad range of techniques to identify a person's meaning so you can check things against multiple tests. For example, my go-to when I can't understand someone is not to ask them what they mean, but to ask myself what I think their speech was intended to accomplish, and I have a lot of success with that... but it's much less useful in a gaming environment, where we're all a bunch of weirdos whose nerves are in overdrive dealing with stage fright and social anxiety, and half of us are just being weird for the sake of deliberately occluding a simultaneous desire to talk to people and a fear of being open with people. And really, even in real life, the "what are they trying to accomplish" advice is mostly useful when people are lying or being confrontational.

So yeah. Ask people what they mean, but have a couple of other tests you can run in case they're lying to you or misunderstanding you or whatever. It's mentally exhausting to have to scan everyone's statements like that, but oh well, that's the world we live in.

In the last three week, 22 out of the 24 residents on my unit of the nursing home I work for have caught COVID. We were on isolation precautions all last week, but today they ended despite one resident having been identified and quarantined just yesterday.

6 of those 22 residents have died. But yes, sure, the crisis is over, let's end isolation so we can start taking in more residents.

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@GreenFlashlight I mean, maybe she's mad that somehow she found a hat and a dress that coordinated perfectly and fucked it all up with a horribly clashing necklace? Because finding something that so perfectly matches that hat or that dress is no small feat, the colors are not common combos by a mile.

Also, that hat is more than most skirts. I mean. Seconding 'how can you even be grumpy in that hat, how?!'

Unless it's a 'lost a bet' hat. I would not totally discount that as a possibility. Or 'omfg that evil cow over there has an even larger hat and it just put someone's eye out, now I seeeeeethe with envy and rage'.

...or someone else showed up in the same hat. "And that's when I shot her, your honor."

Or she has money riding on Katniss losing the Hunger Games.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Dead Celebrities 2020:

I realise this won't ring any bells outside Denmark, but that's a rather bloody huge cultural icon having gone on ahead.

Not to change the subject, but "having gone on ahead" is the most beautiful euphemism I've ever heard for it. Thank you for sharing it, and I'm so sorry for your loss.

I get the feeling that things I find erotic (bonding over shared interests, laughing at inside jokes, slowly earning trust, nervousness about making things good enough for your partner melting into reassurance that you're safe with them) would not be considered erotic here, so... I dunno, That One Lesbian Fuckboi Who's So Hot Even The Straight Girls Are Like 'Damn Gurl.'

@cobaltasaurus said in The Dog Thread:

1. Socialize puppy often.
2. Train puppy not to jump on people / furniture
3. Work on potty training puppy
4. Work on crate training.
5. Post lots of pics of pupperschnupp for MSB people to squee over.

Fixed that for you.

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

So, all that said, people are going to have their opinions but usually I think the concerns about being cast eternally into the darkness of Cancellation for a single misstep are taken pretty far. (It wasn't tasteless jokes that got Louis CK on a lot of people's shitlist, it was years of using his position of power to make women watch him masturbate.)

Reminder for context that Louis CK is not canceled. Despite everything he's done, he was greeted with a standing ovation when he returned to standup barely a year later, and he's currently in the middle of a sold-out international tour.

I mention this to explain why I have absolutely no patience with anyone who complains about being "canceled," because it never means what they pretend it means. It means they think they're so special it's unjust for them to suffer consequences when they spend a lifetime being shitty to people.

@kestrel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Who doesn't want pictures of their brain to gawk at?

"So that's what the squishy gray traitor in my skull looks like."

@rightmeow I feel that the term "clique" is always externally applied. That is, no one who is inside a clique perceives themselves as part of one, and at least a couple of them probably hate another member's guts despite both of them agreeing on whatever topic they're now declared to be in a clique about. As such, it is hard for me to trust the opinion of someone who is not a part of the group they are trying to define by aspersion, just like how I can't trust conservative pundits about what it means to be "woke." I think that kind of outcome-determinative label ("I feel excluded, so your intention must have been to exclude me") can only ever be accidentally accurate.

@lotherio said in Something Completely Different:

Fine I'll be the new scapegoat, everyone can be upset with me now. You can try to paint me as ignorant or not understanding.

I think you are misunderstanding people's complaints. No one wants a scapegoat, and they especially don't want you to be the scapegoat: their anger is largely reserved for other people in this issue. To the degree anyone is angry at you, I think that's because they're exasperated that you seem to be defending one side using underhanded tactics like implying that you are a detached and therefore objective observer, or misrepresenting Auspice's personal problems for the sake of villainizing your opponents.

I don't say you are being underhanded, whether deliberately or accidentally. Miscommunications happen all the time, so I'm not judging. I just think you are letting your defensiveness get in the way of actually understanding the arguments people are bringing to you. If anyone who's been yelling at you thinks I've misread their anger, then they are free to correct me and you obviously should listen to them instead of me.

@shaggy said in Games:

Am I the only one who just doesn't really care for Ares?

Even if I didn't (and I think it's pretty good actually), given that its creator is fairly present on these forums and seems like an abundantly decent person, I would not say so like this.

In no order but alphabetical. Omitting channels already mentioned as of time of writing just to stoke the mystery of which ones I watch. I also left out the twenty or so ASMR channels I watch.

Bowlingotter: A pair of married Let's Players with terrific chemistry (I mean, you'd hope so, right?) and a dorky earnestness you don't get from other channels who're trying so hard to be above it all. I knew I was on board forever when Lissy Sandwich broke into open tears at the end of To The Moon.

CinemaWins: Because too much of the internet thinks film criticism is about finding flaws to establish your mental superiority over the people making movies. Here is a channel about celebrating what makes movies a good time, and while some of it is a stretch, this guy knows the language of film.

Hbomberguy: A feminist and leftist (or possibly liberal, I forget which) who invites you to laugh at stupid people being stupid by citing evidence and reason to explain why they're stupid. Maybe that sounds mean, but he picks truly worthy targets like MRAs, Flat Earthers, and Nazis, so I think it's morally justified.

Jim Sterling: Video game punditry, staunch anti-capitalism, pro-LGBTQ support, and the kind of bizarre humor you can only get from the English. Can't recommend highly enough.

Philosophy Tube: One of the bravest, smartest people on the internet, explaining the mechanics behind the arguments and actions people taking in a relentlessly self-critical way while channeling seemingly endless creativity into the characters and scenarios of his sketches. Olly's improved a lot in last few years after escaping an abusive relationship he's pretty open about discussing, which... the man is a hero to me.

Thought Slime: After so long on the internet listening to edgelords babble about anarchy as a vessel for their thoughtless self-adulation, I had no idea anarchy is a philosophy with a coherent ethos and a serious, achievable set of goals. This channel is run by a man doing his best to try to convince people to care that they exist in a system designed to treat us all as prey and to set us against one another to sacrifice our peers to the greed of those who oppress us all rather than resist as a unified mass. He makes it sound funnier than I do, though.

Tofupupper: In the words of Tofu-Chan himself, "The other night I had a dream where you subscribed to my channel and then I licked your face. Please make it come true." Absurd, abstract comedy built around a handsome goodboi who is apparently also a motivational speaker because why wouldn't he be? Look at his face and tell me you don't feel motivated. Do it. I dare you.

@GirlCalledBlu said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:

If the community takes issues with how you're acting, then maybe you should... change it?

It's not about fitting in with a community to this guy. It's about dominance.

Which, again, just... how sad must you be if that's the level of power you can take pride in exerting?

@groth said in Good TV:

I don't feel being white is particularly key to Tony Stark or Spider-Man in part because their iconic look is fully suited up.

I think being white is pretty key to Tony Stark, only because I'd very much want to know the backstory of how a black American got to be the richest man in the world after inheriting a position as the government's primary if not sole weapons supplier from his father during World War II. In a fictional world we're meant to understand closely parallels our own, him having those advantages in America while not being white opens a lot of question about how his planet's history unfolded differently from ours.

I know I'm going to regret asking, but:

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Content Warning: Penguins might be great for that guy with that traumatic zoo experience, but to everyone else it just sounds stupid.

Do you actually know/know of a single person who has ever asked for this trigger warning or been angry that this trigger warning wasn't included; or are you just crafting ridiculous examples for the sake of being dismissive?

@groth said in Good TV:

In a world where Kanye West exists, is a black billionaire playboy really that unthinkable?

In a world where the police murdering an unarmed black person on camera is okay because the black person committed a crime once, it's hard to imagine people being okay with a black man who wears a fighter jet like a suit and has orbital weapon platforms (Veronica) answerable only to him.

@derp said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Fine. Substitute Canadian Geese, then. Or Spiders. Or the one I started with, the actual example given earlier, Underwater Horrors. I didn't make that shit up.

That's not the question, though. The question is whether you have ever in your life seen or heard of a person being upset that a trigger warning was not given for the example you provided. Because if you haven't, I am struggling to understand why you would make something up just for the sake of mocking it unless your goal is to damn all triggers by association with the one you made up specifically for the purpose of mocking it. Especially in light of previous comments you've made, it sounds very much as if you're constructing a world where it's okay to hurt people because they aren't legitimately asking you to respect their own pain, they're all maliciously out to get you personally by tricking you into thinking they're actually in distress.

Or, stripped of the obfuscating anger I'm using as a defense against my real feelings here, I'm trying to figure out how afraid of you I should be, because it comes off like you deliberately refuse to even entertain the possibilities that your actions might harm others or that it's a problem if you do, because compassion is a resource you limit to immediate friends and family.