Best posts made by insomniac7809

"Where are you located?"
"In the lower level of <building> near <anchor store>."
"Near <completely different anchor store>?"
"No, near <anchor store>."
"On the top floor?"

@L-B-Heuschkel I don't doubt there's a lot of white supremacist deliberate push there, but I think a part of it is just down to visual media (film, especially) casting costume drama and period pieces as entirely white.

Pop culture perception is influenced by pop culture presentation (even as we all absolutely deny that this is the case), so the assumption settles in that Europe didn't have diversity until the 70s. Challenges to this perception are assumed to be agenda-driven, which can even cause filmmakers to consciously cast white to meet audience expectations, further cementing the impression.

@Ominous Wasn't that a JRPG?

You know, the one where a bunch of teenagers with bad hairstyles use the power of friendship to kill God?

@faraday said in Water finds a crack:

Personally I don't really care if you want to start out with expert in piloting and gunnery, as long as you have minimal points spread around the other skills your character should have according to the theme. (for instance, my BSG games required all military personnel to have minimal dots in things like first aid and athletics because that's part of basic training).
But some players do mind. Some players hate that they feel like they have to bend the system to be competitive. Some players feel gipped if they try to make a more balanced character while someone else min-maxxed. Or "messed up" their point/xp spends in a sub-optimal way.
So even numbers-light, co-op PVE games are still subject to the issues described in the article.

I've said before in other threads, and it keeps being true so I'll keep saying it: "good" is only "good" relative to something else. If my sheet says "good" but I'm in a six-player scene with three "great" and two "peerless," "good" sucks.

Even if the great unwashed masses of nameless, faceless NPCs in my position have it ranked as only "average," that doesn't carry a lot of weight to play experience unless they're present in scenes to be compared to.

I do think the point made above is generally on point. Here are two of my "favorite" "optimize the fun away" traps:

*Flat CG costs, multiplicative XP purchases!

Hm, I want to play a learned socialite who's a peerless swordfighter, but I don't have the build points. I'll make a bookish conversationalist who's a competent swordfighter and build up from there.

You know, if you make an illiterate with the social appeal of peat moss who's a peerless swordfighter, you can knock off a third of the XP cost and get where you want to be so much faster.

...you are objectively correct and I hate it.

*Background/fluff skills drawing from the same pool as relevant character stats!
Shadowrun was doing this at least thirty years ago, guys. Fun background skills being suboptimal compared to making my PC with no hobbies outside of Learning the Way of the Sword/Gun isn't cool. (There's also the emergent issue where scenes always lead to a fight, so the people who put their points in social or clever stuff always wind up being stuck trying to survive while the combat wombats get to shine.)

@Wretched XP-based creation or flat XP costs both help with that; that is one of my favorite little changes in ChroD.

Put simply, if you don't want people to minmax at chargen, don't make a system that punishes people for not minmaxing at chargen.

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

Me: I don't appreciate you didn't do your job at all yesterday.
T: …
T: Or that you were late getting into work.
Me: You mean getting that thing done at another area so you can get paid?
T: …
T: You shouldn't have snapped.
Me: You should try doing your job.

@mietze Yeah, taking the scope a good bit beyond RPGs, but...

So I feel like there's a lot of cultural cachet with people who are willing to push boundaries, speak truth to power, defy censorship. And that's not a bad thing! We've got plenty of art that speaks in marginalized voices that the world would, I'd argue, be better off without,

(And yeah, a lot of prurient edgy stuff that I like, regardless of artistic quality or message.)

And yeah, @Ganymede is quite right that good comedy is almost always going to be offensive to someone.

But I see a difference between making cutting observations about your society and lived experience versus trying to claim the label of "brave" by saying *-ist stuff that some people think you shouldn't say. Satire requires clarity of intent and all that, and doing stuff like, IDK, early-2000s Comedy Central or Adult Swim where the joke was just racist jokes with the extra layer of "oh but you're not supposed to say that!"

Hell, talking about comedians, Jerry Seinfeld had two gay joke routines that kind of come to mind. There was a whole episode where people started thinking Jerry and George were in a relationship, and the main thrust of the joke was "we have to prove that we're not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that!"--that is, the joke is that they're properly tolerant but obviously it's a bad thing if people think they're gay, which is a legit cultural commentary and observation to make. Then recently (well, "recently" in that it was five years ago, fucking time progressing where does it get off) he went on Seth Meyers to complain about political correctness because a bit of his bombed where he compared scrolling on your phone to looking like "a gay French king." The whole thrust of his, well, whingefest was that it was the PC attitudes that kept college students from appreciating his brilliance, not because the joke was kind of shitty and a bunch of college kids in '15 honestly didn't see anything funny about scrolling on your phone or being gay. (No matter what a big deal he was in the 90s, not only aren't people owed an audience, they definitely aren't owed a laugh.)

Also compare the shows of Dave Chappelle and Carlos Mencia. Chappelle actually walked away at the height of his career because he thought his observations about race were being taken as just racist jokes, or giving white kids license to tell racist jokes. Mencia was more than happy to just be the guy who tells jokes where the punchline is racism but it's okay because he's Hispanic.

@Rinel That may be nominally true, but the War on Christmas isn't going as well as conservative opinion hosts would have you believe. Advent can be considered entirely Christmas territory, and has been for some time; Thanksgiving remains nominally independent, but in practice, it and its entire month of November are operating under the Yuletide sphere of influence.

At this point, I think we need to consider Halloween occupied territory; I saw Christmas trees going up at the mall where I work by October 29.

@ganymede said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@insomniac7809

As an amateur humorist, I appreciate your take on this.

{...]
Anyhow, yeah. Sensitivity is important. Satire and social criticism is good if you're clearly punching up and not spiking down on the oppressed at the same time.

(Double posting because I started writing my last post, wandered off, the posts didn't load, and I missed this one. Unless someone else posted while I was typing this up and following your links, in which case it isn't a double post.)
(ADDED BEFORE SUBMITTING: As long as it wound up taking me to write this out, it seems likely someone did, but I'm not checking.)

Yeah, it's a thorny issue all around.

Even beyond the issue of how someone feels around the rest of his other work, someone can be solid on a topic they're comfortable on and misstep when they branch out. I've had some personal experience with black coworkers who were very thoughtful and considered on race relations topics, more... iffy when it came to stuff with women, and, uh, let's say struggling when it came to LBGTQ issues. (A couple stockroom conversations I walked in on between my gay and straight black coworkers had me announcing "if HR asks I wasn't here for any of this.")

I definitely agree that the line between "observation" and "stereotype" can be a tricky one. Hell, that job was a shoe store, I worked there for eight years. For most of the time I was the only straight guy who worked outside of the stockroom. I'd point that out for a laugh. ("I thought it was a little strange, and then I said it out loud and heard myself.") Obviously the joke was based on stereotypes, that working at a shoe store mostly appealed to gay men and women. Is it harmful to joke about? I mean, I still think it's funny, I hope it isn't. How many people in creative/ theater/ RP spaces I've moved in are queer or neurodivergent, I think that can be a point to make as long as I'm not making them the butt of the joke.

So, like. Out of the linked routines, "Don't Ask, Don't Tuck" was... I mean, I don't know that it was hateful or anything, but it seemed pretty lazy and frankly not very funny. The one about Jenner, though, that one I'd say is "irresponsible" in the same sense that I used in my above post. The basis of the joke is pretty much the idea that people can be turned queer if they (or, say, their parents) aren't careful about their behavior or surroundings. It's a real idea that causes real harm. Which doesn't mean it's not an idea that can be joked about, but I do think that making it the punchline is a shitty thing to do. No one's really going to get the idea from a SNL routine, but it can still reinforce the attitude that it's true.

And, of course, I'm cis, so this is just my thoughts and take. If the "don't ask, don't tuck" joke is going to be taken worse than I think it would, I don't think I'm the person to say. Not that every trans person is, or can be, the definitive authority--hell, in this post I used the -Q on LGBT and used the word "queer" to refer to non-cishet, and there's definitely some disagreement on whether or not that's still a word that counts as a slur. It's true that you can't please everyone, y'know? But a given trans person probably has a better idea than I do about whether the joke goes beyond the pale. (Fun fact: "beyond the pale" is a reference to the inhuman savagery of the Irish. See, "the pale" is an archaic term for a wall, like the ones set up around the English fortifications.)

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.) Most of the time, people do seem to get a lot of chances to do better, and the real backlash doesn't start to come until they octuple down and treat every "could you not" as a dare to take it further. People were pointing out Rowling's tendency to like or boost transphobic material on social media for years before she masked-off with her TERF views.

Not to say there aren't cases of people digging up material from years back, or making it up wholecloth, to smear people they dislike, whether out of some vendetta or a sincere belief that the person they're going after should be deplatformed. (Or one leading to the other.) And, unfortunately, small or independent creators are a lot more vulnerable to this than the people whose views have a lot more reach. I could say this isn't any different from other ways people have organized socially to silence people they dislike, and it would be true, but it does feel insufficient. People shouldn't do this, and they definitely shouldn't brigade or harass based on this. I wish I could say something better about this.

...Christ, this is a lot of words to talk about how there's a lot going on with all this and I don't have great answers. I could've actually been writing something. I hope someone gets something out of all this.

(Also, a bit of a "well technically:" there's plenty to criticize Democrats over as far as LGBT advocacy, but (and I realize this is one of those "anything before 'but' doesn't actually count" things, but I do think it's significant (recursion!)) while DADT banned openly gay servicemembers, before its passage the US military banned gay members from serving at all. "They asked, I lied," as a veteran professor of mine put it (theater class, natch). There wasn't enough support for a full repeal of the ban on gay servicemembers under Clinton, so while DADT was homophobic, it was a faltering, clumsy step toward gay rights, not against them.)

@Tinuviel It could be the zeroth decade, and that would be only marginally more godawful than the "aughts."

I mean, "the naughties." People suggested that shit with a straight face. We've had almost exactly twenty years and no one's come up with a name for the decade that isn't just shit.

...and between that and "zoomers" I feel like whoever picks these names just stopped giving a shit around the time they figured out GenX.

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

@Auspice Even better when they don't mention a country.

USA, EST unless otherwise specified.

Get with the hegemony here.

@surreality said in Separating Art From Artist:

@insomniac7809 said in Separating Art From Artist:

In terms of what you, @Pandora and @Ghost are decrying as "censorship" in this thread, that the Millennial/Zoomer Outrage Machine is going to banish someone's work to the outer dark over a minor infraction? Nah. Not a thing.

...except as someone working in the arts community, I can tell you, it's a thing. It's a thing people are talking about, are actively being threatened about (mostly older artists, yes, mostly boomers, but the point stands).

I see a whole lot more people talking about it and worrying about it than it actually happening. I mean, maybe I'm only seeing the most high-profile cases, but all the "cancel culture" I've seen is just people getting basic consequences for shitty behavior, which wasn't invented in 2016. (Or, at least as often, people suffering no real consequences except a few thinkpieces coming out about them.)

Yeah, sometimes a work ages like milk behind a radiator. And that shit sucks for the creator, but like, if the consequence is that people don't want to consume it anymore, that happens.

Again, maybe this is a whole lot more of a Thing in some smaller artist spaces, but all the examples I've seen are shit like Hart ("he joked about beating his son straight, wouldn't apologize, and didn't get to host the Oscars!") or Rosanne Barr ("so your twitter history is a decade of 9/11 trutherism and racist garbage, but you still have a nationally syndicated TV show as long as you can refrain from saying black people look like monkeys while the show is running. Okay? Rosanne? Can you handle that?"). Or, of course, Weinstein.

See, with the specific examples given...

I don't know Dr. Who. Never been my thing. Moffat takes a lot of crap, I've seen that much. But a) as I've said, people are allowed to hate things for a lot of reasons. Maybe it's true that he's just not very good, or at least not appealing to very many people (like I said, I don't watch the show). Maybe it's just a bad idea to spend years saying awful things about at least half of your potential fanbase. Who knew, huh? Either way, I'm not really feeling that he's a victim here.

Whedon, meanwhile... okay, there's a fair bit to unpack here. I'm gonna start off by saying that I am, on the whole and on balance, a fan of his work.
That said, a fair bit of his success has always related to his image. Even though he's definitely one of those writers I can fairly clearly hazard guesses at his fetishes, at the time, a show with a feminist theme and a queer woman who was only moderately fetishized for the male audience was a big stride. But you can't take a boost for your persona and then complain if your career takes a hit when the image is, let us say, tarnished.
Even then, as far as his career... he hasn't had any movies come out since the revelations, but then, the last two movies he's had his name on were fair-to-bad. He's co-creator on Agents of Shield, which is wrapping up three years after the revelations came out (a post-cancellation runtime longer than Firefly or Dollhouse lasted). There's a Buffy reboot coming out with his name on it, and he's getting another show about a bunch of women given special powers (who could have guessed?) set to release in 2021? If that's what being cancelled looks like, y'know, sign me up for some of that.

Kate Smith... okay, this is a more delicate case, and if it was parodic then that kinda sucks for herself and her legacy. That said. She hasn't been scrubbed from the cultural canon. She's being re-examined in the context we find ourselves in now; that's what culture and history are, that's what they've always been. The punishment for recording some really racist stuff a while ago is that the Flyers have decided that she no longer gets to have a monument to her cast in bronze outside their stadium,

@Derp said in Separating Art From Artist:

The Klan is taboo because we as a society have chosen for it to be. But it wasn't always.

Sure it was. That's why they hid their faces behind the stupid pointy ghost hoods.

That's why the worst thing that happened to them was a serial on the Superman radio show that leaked all their dumbfuck code names and secret handshakes.

Their big fear has always been exposure.

"Do you carry <brand>?"
"We do! Was there something from them you were looking for?'
"No, I bought something from <brand> and need to return it. I can do that here, right?"

...no. Fuck's wrong with you?

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

You have to use sick days (and wow the idea there is even such a thing just blows my mind, like your body is a clock you can time to a certain number of days to be sick)

Of course it isn't a machine you can time to a certain number of days it can be sick.

It's a machine that has a certain amount of scheduled maintenance allotted. If if goes over that, clearly it needs to be replaced with a model that isn't defective.

@Kestrel said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:

It wasn't even very good gaslighting. He can surely come up with better lies than that.

To lift from the Avatar section of 2nd Edition Unknown Armies:

Taboos: Whatever doubt the Demagogue might feel, no matter what reservations might plague him privately, the Demagogue never admits he was wrong, especially not in public. There can be weaseling (“It now appears that I was given incorrect information—but the basic premises of my ideas are still as logical and rock-solid as ever . . .”) and waffling (“Oh, you misinterpreted what I said. Here’s what I meant . . .”) but any show of ideological softness is a break with the archetype.

This doesn’t mean the Demagogue can’t change his position or contradict himself. Far from it—all it means is that each change and contradiction has to be presented as the logical consequence of what went before. If you said the Information Superhighway was bad last Thursday and now you’re saying it’s good, that’s not a problem. You have many options. One is to explain that what you said last Thursday was deliberately misinterpreted by your enemies (the CIA, a crypto-fascist political conspiracy, the bleeding-heart liberal press, whoever).
The other is to simply bull your way through: “My position on the Information Superhighway has not changed, and I will not stand for these smears and accusations!”

Released in 2002, BTW. Just... putting that out there.

@Admiral

okay so yeah calling Catholics a hate group is fucked, but if people in the QUILTBAG aren't willing to just overlook the doctrines re: the queers I can't say I'll hold that against them?

idk it's kind of a big issue.