Best posts made by insomniac7809

@rinel said in Good or New Movies Review:

@ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

@rinel said in Good or New Movies Review:

What I did not like was the feeling of "African American culture bad, fictional Wakandan culture good" that I got.

I can't argue with a feeling, but I think you may have missed what the writers were getting at.

What I got was that Wakandans find African American culture "bad" because it was born out of a history of oppression. What I saw T'Challa wrestling with was Wakanda's part in that history. What I understood was that T'Challa discovered and concluded that Wakanda was as responsible for that oppression as the oppressors because they let it happen when they could have intervened and ended it.

I understand that in the abstract and agree with it. But the viewers' interactions with Black Americans are limited to Killmonger, his girlfriend (who gets maybe two lines?), and an assortment of children. Killmonger seems to go heavy on the AAVE dialect when he is engaging in "thuggish" behavior. At best, the movie is putting forward some sort of "Wakandan man's burden," where a fictional country must elevate American blacks through advanced technology and intervention. I don't think any of this was the intended message of the film. It just seemed like it was sort of implied in the way that the director emphasized certain things.

Going outside the text to things the director's said...

He's commented, for one, that between the hero and the villain of Black Panther, a royal warrior from an Afro-futurist utopia vs a kid from the Oakland housing projects, one of the two is slightly easier for him to relate to than the other.

I think that the central issue in the film, the conflict about intervention... so maybe this is going further afield, but. The notion of Wakanda is a hyper-advanced nation in Africa that avoided colonization by Europeans for the entirety of their history. To the director, on the one hand, this is an awesome escapist fantasy. On the other, when you start to worldbuild from the concept, the central question comes around to "well where the hell were they, what were they doing, why didn't they stop it."

So instead of dodging the issue, he made that the central conflict of the film, both in T'challa's personal sense and as the driving motive for the villain.

It's always kinda a balancing act. The Voices thing is a really good one on Arx, picking out people who are empowered with all the Head Honcho's authority ad spreading the workload around. But I really don't agree with people who say that faction leadership should always be NPCs. I get that it can be hard to find a player who can step up, but "NPC only" except for antagonists is always a call I'm iffy on. (Easier in a roster game, so the sphere leadership doesn't change every couple weeks.)

IC relationships, that can be another tricky one. I won't try and say there's a hard and fast rule for how much someone should be able to ghost on their IC significant other before the other player decides they're done for OOC reasons. Relationship RP is a big part of the draw for a lot of people, and someone who isn't getting that from their RP partner shouldn't be expected to stick with a ghost for the sake of the PCs.

Dependent PCs... okay, I really, really rarely do those myself. I need a HUGE amount of trust if I'm going to make one of my PCs that intimately tied to another PC, if I'm not planning to ditch the character if the other PC goes. The only thing I can say is to NOT do what one modWoD storyteller did, which was slate a ghoul to be executed because her regnant was gone for so long that she declared him IC absent instead of just away doing stuff.

@admiral said in RL Anger:

I had a really, really interesting talk with a black coworker about the allegations against Bill Cosby. He claimed there was a lot of skepticism in the black community about the timing of the charges against him. I tried whitesplaining to him that it wasn't because Bill Cosby was black.

I mean, does it make a difference that the guy who pointed it out (that is, pointed out that Cosby had been paying off and trying to silence accusations for decades on the public record) was a black comedian?

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@surreality Additionally there's just the fact that it is a problematic system. It was designed for friends gathered around a table. Granularity is fairly abysmal, there is a terrible balance between skills and attributes, and several skills are far too broad (Crafts and Expression being the biggest criminals in the lot).

Kinda disagree about the last point, at least in its native environment; I'm pretty cool with games that have broad skills outside of the narrative focus of the game. How much you know about the gribblies and horrors is central, so Occult gets its own skill; painting and auto repair are less so, so they get lumped together in broad strokes.

So tge Fantasia Film Festival in July is going to debut The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, starring Sam Elliott.

@d-bone said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@Faraday Except isn't that like a standard trope.. of literally every bit of fiction that has existed? Like isn't all media based on the idea that is breaking your 'suspension of disbelief'?

Not... really?

I mean, there's a lot of stories where the hero starts out as some nobody and becomes Awesome mcBadass, but there's plenty where they don't. Sherlock Holmes shows up as a genius detective/prizefighter, and basically stays there through 130 years of storytelling. Unless you're doing a "Batman Begins/Year One" story specifically, Batman generally starts the story as Batman and remains Batman. Starbuck doesn't really "level up" her shooting/brawling/Viper piloting/attituding skills through the BG run. Even in Star Wars, Luke goes from farm boy to Jedi master, but Han shows up as a scoundrel/gunfighter/pilot whiz in Ep4 and is still a scoundrel/gunfighter/pilot whiz in Ep7.

And while some of the fun of XP and stat-building can be "I'm developing and improving!", it can also be "I'm getting incrementally closer to having the character I actually wanted to be playing from the start!"

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

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

Yes please continue to lecture me about the topic you have no education in while I sit here and polish my framed degree.

Fuck I hate people.

The best is when a simple Google search would actually give a decent overview of what they're trying to lecture about.

(Hint: movies/TV shows are generally the worst places pull knowledge from. Esp. when it's computer/IT stuff. I present you why I can never watch NCIS.)

I still think a PC game should put in a hacking minigame where you win by typing gibberish as fast as you possibly can. Really immerse yourself in the experience.

Also, https://youtu.be/3aipwDzC2hw

@d-bone said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@insomniac7809 The Sherlocke holmes analogy fails a little bit because there is also Watson, who is the lens with which the book exists.. and is receiving training basically from Holmes throughout the entire series.. even if he never really gets any better. That isn't to say that Watson is the protagonist, but the trope exists in the literature.

There is the first movie sure for batman, but then you can have your deathstroke.. you know where batman meets super batman? And Batman has to learn to be a better batman to beat super batman?

The problem with your comparison to Han is that like.. character growth can occur both in a skill level, but also emotionally as well. Character development is a sign of character depth, in your Han analogy, Han doesn't grow as a thief, but he grows as a person. He goes against his princples of money first and goes back to save luke, and more.

See, though, like you said--Watson doesn't really get to be a better detective, he has to get by as merely a lady-killing doctor army veteran/bumbling comic relief sidekick/source of unresolved sexual tension (pick as appropriate for given media).

Batman has had a few stories where he has to become better at being Batman (because 89 years of comics, written fiction, television, video games, and movies have had Batman doing basically everything at some point), but usually he doesn't buy up his Batman skills, he just has to figure out a way to out-Batman Bane or Deathstroke.

Han becomes a better person, but that's not the sort of thing that needs to be reflected with RPG mechanics. (It could be, but it doesn't have to.)

The thing where someone needs to training montage their way to the peak, or go from zero to hero, is definitely a thing in a certain kind of fiction. It's not the be all or end all by any stretch, even of genre fiction, and development as a person isn't the same thing as developing skill slots.

It's just really, really uncommon for RPGs, where character capability improvement is taken as one of the cornerstones of the game. And I wonder how much of that would change if people could app the Man With No Name at chargen, instead of apping Dave the Moderately Skilled Gunfighter and building him up over time. Or if the raising of stats is something that really draws people to the games.

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

Weird. Places I go, close the door when they want to stop taking orders. You are often welcome to stay 30-60 minutes after that. They'll let you know when the kitchen is closing.

Places I've worked, people are, of course, allowed to come in right to the very second of our posted business hours and stay as long as they like.

Because the people who set these policies are more than happy to toss another hour of minimum wage at the people who actually have to stay another hour away from our, y'know, families to deal with That Guy.

If you want to see passive aggression embodied, behold the wage slave who isn't actually allowed to kick That Guy out because it's closing time.

@ganymede I agree that advice should be taken on its own merits, and I wholeheartedly agree that magazines like Teen Vogue and Cosmo are doing great work in their coverage.

At the same time, I think it's a bit harsh to assume that skepticism on Cosmo advice has to be sexist in nature, when people might be more familiar with relationship advice like "if he seems happy, it's because he's cheating on you; if he starts taking care of his appearance, it's to look good for the woman he's cheating on you with; if he starts sharing details about his day, it's to cover for what he was really doing (cheating on you)."

@griatch said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:

It also doesn't make sense to have a national vote on a work day like many countries have. Either make election day a holiday or move it to the weekend...

I mean, some of us are guaranteed to work on holidays and weekends...

But there is actually a reason that Americans hold elections on Tuesdays.

See, back when we were setting this all up, a whole lot of our population was living on farms. So the assumption was that citizens--or, well, voters, which is to say the man of the house who actually owned the land--would need to take a day to ride into town, and another day to ride back.

And since no good Christian man would be travelling on a Sunday, the idea was that you would ride into town on Monday, vote on Tuesday, and ride back out to the farm on Wednesday.

(I said it was a reason not that it was a good one.)

@thenomain I haven't heard on any word that Smith has been involved in anything beyond their text game. (Where, yes, the game included a trans vampire named Avery, after he drove trans RPG developer Avery Alder, writer of Monsterhearts, out of publishing for some time.)

I don't know about alt-right edgelord stuff in Changeling, personally. When Hill left the spot, according to his own account on rpg.net, it was over the fact that White Wolf/Paradox would hold final approval over all the material he wrote, while being willing to hire ZakS (and releasing a new edition of a short story anthology, published with the name of accredited sci-fi/fantasy editor and convicted child molester Ed Kramer on the cover).

@tinuviel A~and I said what about, Breakfast at Tiffany's...

okay actual peeve: District Manager, maybe instead of chewing out your employees for breaking and clogging the vacuum cleaners all the time by being careless, maybe you should spring for a vacuum cleaner that can handle the shit that's always on our floors in a case that doesn't fly apart if we lightly brush it on the furniture while we're getting the corners. Just a thought.

ETA: whose fucking brilliant idea was it to change out tile for carpet in a retail store, anyway?

Staff Sgt. Batholemeaux P. Insomniac saved my life in Korea. In 1973.

...or maybe I just feel like reiterating the "named myself after my godawful sleep schedule" for two posts in a row is boring.

Hey, who remembers "rainbow parties"?

How about "butt chugging?"

Neither of those were things, of course, but you know what were?

Streaking, phonebooth stuffing, goldfish eating, panty raids, and pole sitting.

Young people do dumb shit.

@arkandel Technically @Templari complained about being dogpiled, which is exactly the sort of community-based free speech shouting down that "no moderation" advocates.

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

Waking up.

I mean, beats the alternative.

@insomnia I mean, I don't think it's that hard to get. It's a label that's supposed to be a negative, somehow, but why the hell should people who it's applied to shy away from it? At all?

The connotation of the swastika in Western society is Nazis. The connotation of identity-related slurs is to reinforce a negative social position of the identity they refer to (which is how neutral terms can become slurs over time as they take on the negative social connotation). SJW just means that the person being labelled as such supports a thing that they do, in fact, support. Which is, as perceived by the recipient and by a literal reading of the term, justice and doing good. Why the hell shouldn't people jump into that particular brier patch?

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

@admiral

Yo, if this by how Austin is, y'ain't selling it on me.

"Keep Austin A Surreal Nightmare-Land?"

@ominous said in Inspiration material for your current game:

@kanye-qwest My bad. I just assume all things awesome in fantasy are written by Sanderson or Pratchett and as First Law isn't comedic...

It is pretty funny! For a certain sense of humor.

But honestly... there's a good bit of First Law DNA in Arx, but the setting is too much PVP-averse, loaded up with genuinely decent people, and involving conflicts with Capital E Evil threats for me to think of @LordGrimdark's work as a 'required reading' sort of thing.