Best posts made by insomniac7809

Yeeeeeah, sorry Arkandel but I'm like... five minutes into that video and I'm going to give myself a migraine from rolling my eyes so hard.

Like, a minute in, he's giving a pitch-perfect recital of the Thermian argument--link to the video that coined the phrase, but for those who don't want to watch a five-minute video, the "Thermian argument" is presenting the fictional in-universe justification for a plot or setting element as a response to critique, as though the speaker was a Thermian from Galaxy Quest. (If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul, and the Thermians are a species of alien who don't understand that fiction exists, so when they have to deal with a conquering warlord coming to exterminate them, they kidnap the actors of a Star Trek expy to save them. Also watch Galaxy Quest it's hilarious and also legitimately the best Star Trek movie ever made.)

Point is: he tries to brush aside criticism of the racial problems with orcs by citing the in-universe explanation of how the orcs are actually elves who'd been tortured and degraded by Morgoth. Someone who knew Tolkien better, though, would know that this was only one of several explanations he toyed with through the years, although it's the closest that's come to a "canonical" answer. Other thoughts included the idea that Morgoth created the orcs as a mockery of Men and Elves, but that ran into the issue that evil, in Tolkien's conception, can only corrupt but not create. Another was that orcs aren't really alive at all, just matter set into motion by Morgoth and Sauron's will, but that has the issue with how they're presented in the books as individuals with personal desires, grudges, and so on. The thing about being corrupted elves is the best one he came up with, but as mentioned, that runs into the issue that corrupted elves should, then, be redeemable.

What all that word word words amounts to, though, is Tolkien trying to reconcile his cosmology and Catholic worldview with what orcs actually are, which is: something that looks like a person only hideous and inherently evil. (The letter mentioned in the video and the article referenced, incidentally, has Tolkien describing the orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." "Mongol-types," here, being a reference to the archaic racial classifications, Caucasioid, Mongolod, and Negroid. You can tell that orcs are monsters because they look like really ugly Asian people.)

So no, some post-hoc worldbuilding to explain why the degraded and repulsive Mongoloid horde of subhumans are coming to slaughter, enslave, and rape the virtuous Normans and Saxons who stand against them doesn't actually make it stop being some really racist tropes. And then we can get into the D&D presentation of orcs, where they're physically powerful but mentally dim tribal creatures with an inherently savage disposition, lead by chiefs and bolstered by shamans or witch doctors to provide spellcasting ability. Incidentally, Gygax explained to D&D players that killing orc babies was moral behavior because "nits make lice," a word for word quote from when Colonel John Chivington sent the US Army to kill Cheyanne children at Sand Creek, Colorado.

(Oh, hey, and he brings up the Drow, too. The elves who have black skin because they turned evil. Like the Curse of Ham.)

Like, I'm not saying "cancel Tolkien" or "cancel Gygax" (although seriously Gary the fuck), but it's frankly some willful blindness to pretend that the "evil races" in fantasy and D&D don't have some fucked-up relationships to the real world. (This wasn't a discovery made on Tumblr, either. Michael Moorecock touched on a good bit of this in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers" in 1978, and The Iron Dream was written in 1974, with the conceit that it was a classic heroic pulp novel written by Adolph Hitler after his political ambitions didn't work out.)

Okay, back into this... six minutes whining about how someone ate a ban on RPG.net because people were saying to talk to an actual Native American before writing Native Americans into a published setting, and this guy gave a whole thing about how that's hard. Neato.

Two minutes complaining about pronouns. Rock the fuck on.

Okay, cool, and now we're onto PETA... oh he's saying that considering marginalized people who might be in your audience is exactly like PETA talking about how we shouldn't use animal characteristics as insults because he's made the whole argument around a strawman that people are saying that literally no one should ever be offended by anything so "what will the PETA people think" is exactly the same as "is this being racist and will that drive minorities out of my hobby."

Right, fuck this, tapping out.

Also, in a feeble and ill-considered defense of my gender, it's not just dudes who MU* a gay member of the opposite sex as a fetishy stereotype.

Oh wow.

@Tyche turned out to be an racist shitbrain.

Who could have seen that coming.

What an entirely unforseeable development.

@coin said in Real life versus online behaviors:

The internet is where moderation and limitations come to die. You wanna see what someone's willing to do, say, and support? Go online.

I don't care if you're a fucking saint in every social interaction offline--if you're a dick online that means you wanna be a dick and think it's funny. The degree to which that's a problem varies widely.

"The person who's a sweetheart to their date and an asshole to the waiter is an asshole."

I just don't really buy the whole "community will regulate bigoted shit-flinging" deal, especially on the intertubes.

That works as long as the community has a strong core of non-shitbags who are, for whatever reason, dedicated to sticking out and shouting down shitbaggery. As opposed to non-shitbags just picking up sticks and going somewhere with a less unpleasant shitbag/non- ratio, which itself skews the ratio shitbag-wise, making it less appealing to non-shitbags, and on and on and now you have 4chan.

The image links to the thread. It was a worthwhile read, to me at least.

@arkandel said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@tyche said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@wizz said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

I get a little tired of the dumb, brassy lynch mob attitude around here sometimes.

Toxic femininity.

What the hell man. Especially not in this forum section, not that it works in any. Come on.

Are you... I mean, are you surprised? Like at all?

@BlondeBot said in Model Policies?:

Shhhhh, it's okay. Show me on the doll where my bad rules examples hurt you...

Your examples are bad policy because

@BlondeBot said in Model Policies?:

No politics
No social justice
No sexuality/gender/orientation

means that, while my saying on channel that I went to see Star Wars with my wife is unobjectionable in any context, there are a lot of people (especially on MU*s) for whom that would qualify as a "political," "social justice," or "sexuality/ gender/ orientation" statement.

@Pandora has the right of it comparing such a policy to DADT. "Don't bring up sexual orientation" has never meant "cishets aren't allowed to mention that they have a spouse/SO." "Don't bring up sexual orientation" always just means "queers, stay in the closet."

A policy tries to force political neutrality, and does so by determining someone's existence to be a political statement, is taking an intensely political stance.

@Kestrel said in Tyche Banned:

feeding and allowing him to oh-so slyly provocateur on this forum for so long to begin with.

You know, that's the thing.

I'm not talking shit about him on this thread because he and I argued a lot and, now that he's gone, I'm wallowing in schadenfreude and taking some cowardly potshots when he's not here to clap back at me.

(Okay, I'm not just doing that don't @ me)

It's been really clear for a really long time that Tyche was not engaging in good faith. I'm not saying this because we disagree on politics, I'm saying it because he kept breaking the rules, kept catching a warnings, and not once did he interpret these warnings as "I should engage with the other posters on this forum like a decent human being." At most, he tried to ask a couple questions to work out exactly where the line was for various-ist trolling so he could creep right back up to that line and start edging his toe at it.

Until he finally, finally overstepped it enough that he got shitcanned from the forum, about as unpredictably as the fucking sun rising in the fucking east.

Which was always the way this was going to go. If someone breaks a rule, catches a warning, and shapes up, then hey, we have a good forum citizen, slaughter the fatted calf. If someone instead shifts the exact same pattern of behavior but not-technically-quite breaking the rules as they understand them, they will keep catching warnings until they finally get kicked out for good. The only question is how much they shit the place up until it reaches that point.

My $0.02 anyway.

Does anyone else get flashbacks to The Producers? "YOU ARE THE AUDIENCE! I OUTRANK YOU!"

I'm not saying that fans aren't terrible, but, y'know, the finales of GoT and BSG had problems and trying to dismiss dissatisfaction with those problems as fan entitlement is almost as arrogant and entitled as the guy who got the "REMAKE SEASON 8" skywriting.

BSG had written itself into the corner because, while the Cylons might have had a plan, the writers clearly didn't; they'd spent years introducing Portentous Elements without the faintest clue as to what they were portents of, and dear Lord were the seams showing by the end. GoT had almost the opposite problem, where the last season was desperately ticking boxes at an increasingly breakneck pace to reach the predetermined conclusion at the expense of the characters, messiness, and ambiguity that made the show a success in the first place. Both of the shows suffered, badly, from writers getting excited by "nobody would expect this!" without wondering if the reason nobody would expect it is because it is a terrible idea.

And yeah, people complain about the media we consume. We care about the media we consume. I get how awful it must be to have people coming out of the woodwork to shit on your creative work--I really do. But unless we want to be Kafka, dying with a stack of unpublished works and instructions for our executor to burn them sight unseen, the point is to be consumed and to get a reaction. And yeah, sometimes that reaction, en masse, is going to be "that was horseshit."

@fortydeuce said in MU Things I Love:

Big ups to folks who keep IC antagonism IC and maintain a cheerful OOC environment all round. Fairen/Harlan/new-Grazia@Arx (didn't know old-Grazia!), here's looking at you! It is so much easier to have a scene where characters openly dislike each other when everyone's on the same page about it being strictly IC. Frappuccinos for all! (I would if I could.)

This is the best thing, I swear. Give me some drama and conflict in-story, without it being a thin veneer over OOC nerdrage.

"Nobody wants to work anymore," I keep hearing.

Motherfuckers of course nobody wants to work, that's what work is. If they wanted to work you'd be charging them for the privilege. The whole thing is that you need to pay us to come work anyway.

If you won't offer people enough to work that's not a them problem it's a you problem.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I mean it to say that if I fuck up on Rinel (and boy have I fucked up), I'm just someone who doesn't understand Oathlands culture. If I fuck up on Marion, I run the risk of being really offensive.

Which is also something I've considered in WoD games, especially since my PC defaults are frequently some variant on "petty criminal." The optics on that are different if I make the character a PoC.

I've also been mulling over how I play Thesarin, just because the "barbarian" fantasy tropes have some uncomfortable origins.

I don't know. Maybe more people could consider making their PC something other than their own phenotype, just because why not. It doesn't need to be a Statement about the X experience (probs should just not be from a not-X).

Plus... I don't know. The biggest valley girl I know IRL is second-generation Chinese. While I get that people have problems playing across gender, my big secret for going undetected as "dude playing a lady PC" is "don't bring up her tits unprompted."

@Ghost said in Emotional bleed:

Why is this behavior less associated with playing Among Us and when it happens when people play "Call of Duty" it's approached like an unhealthy attachment, but when it happens in MU the inmates push to treat it like a normalized behavior that shouldn't be approached as abnormal?

If I don't feel things when I play a video game, it isn't a video game I'm going to be interested in.

Same with books, movies, all sorts of narrative media. Feeling feelings about imaginary people's feelings is kind of what drama is for. If my response to a narrative work is "that certainly was a series of events happening in chronological order" this isn't high praise.

So I can agree that people should, y'know, manage their shit and deal with IC IC, but I don't feel like "the fictional emotions of fictional characters have effected my emotional state" is a problem that needs working on.

@Warma-Sheen said in Game of Thrones:

I was pretty harsh about the show, but since last week, I think I've changed my opinion a little.

***=Having had some time removed from the episode that really pissed people off...***

click to show

... I think people are being overly harsh because they didn't get the happy ending they wanted. A lot of people wanted a Disney ending. All the heroes die as saviors or live to glorious admiration and respect. Well, GoT isn't Disney. And it never has been.

No, I don't think this is it.

I mean, maybe some of it is, but
***=More Spoilery Goodness***

@Derp said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

Yes, there are some bad actors out there, but ultimately, in almost every instance, they cannot actually hurt you. It's words, on a screen, on a game.

I really think that you're underselling the degree to which a stalker can make people feel unsafe and uncomfortable in real life.

It's possible, sure, to treat online interaction as an espionage game; maintain discrete, disconnected identities, ensure they don't overlap, be ready to burn any given identity at a moment's notice. It's even easier than it is in real life. But it's exhausting, and it's unnatural, and it's awkward, and it's a lot to expect from people interacting in a social environment.

Which ties into another thing, actually: this whole idea that "online" is different from "real life." We're living in the two thousand and nineteenth year of the common era. There are voting citizens whose parents began their relationships over the internet. The President of the United States sets government policy over twitter. Online interaction is just interaction, only with some more anonymity than in the meatspace.

"Your stalker probably isn't going to find you IRL" isn't as reassuring as you seem to think it is.

Here's my only thoughts on the Grindledore thing:

It's not about showing sex scenes in a kids' movie.

But when Lupin and Tonks got together, it was acknowledged that they were in a relationship, even though the relationship doesn't really matter for the plot. Say it and move on.

That Grindlewald and Dumbledore are together is buried in subtext, even though their history is a major plot point in the narrative.

I don't believe this has anything to do with what works best for the story, as opposed to being too chickenshit to acknowledge a gay relationship in text rather than subtext.

Personally, I consider it a benchmark of my development as a gamer and a person when, after having an app restricted for reasons I felt were bad, I started saying "this doesn't seem to be a fit for me, I should look for fun elsewhere" rather than "they are WRONG and I am going to TAKE A STAND."