Best posts made by insomniac7809

So I've been thinking a lot about the new Candyman film for the last few days and I'm gonna brain dump a bit
The premise of the property is that Candyman is an urban legend where, if you say his name five times while you look in the mirror, he appears and kills you. In-fiction it's an urban legend in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago, which hadn't been demolished and gentrified when the first film came out.
The story is that he'd been a black painter who'd been commissioned to make a portrait of a landowner's wife, and the two of them had an affair. And when they were found out, he was gruesomely murdered.
And the conceit of the film is that he exists as the story. He is, in-universe, a boogeyman kids talk about to give themselves the creeps. You have a story of a lynching, and a direct parallel between that and modern-day black people in the inner city who've been left abandoned.
But our protagonist, our viewpoint character, is a white grad student.
So this is one of the things you see a lot in horror, where the monster is an intrusion into the everyday. Back to Dracula, where instead of having the courtesy to stay in the decaying castle in the Continent like a proper Gothic fiction menace, he follows Harker home to (then-)contemporary London and starts victimizing and corrupting our pure Anglo-Saxon women.
You see it a lot in horror, when you're looking for it. Our protagonist is from the modern, rational world, and being attacked by something out of the superstitious worldview. Frequently there's an exposition scene where our protagonist needs to get help from someone who understands the rules they have to live with now, who's foreign, or crazy, or ethnic, or maybe just countercultural or female.
So Candyman (which is, to be clear, one of my favorite movies ever made) is a story about black people who have been abused, but as the Other. Our viewpoint is the white middle-class academic woman menaced by a black bogeyman.
(Even in the sequels--which I'll otherwise not speak of--the protagonists are the direct descendants of Candyman's mixed-race child, they appear and present entirely as white women.)
Which is why I'm really looking forward to seeing an interpretation of the property where our writer, director, and protagonist are black. See the take on the story from the people who live it, not just the outsider who gets dragged into it.

@mietze Do what you need to as far as how strict or loose the rules are; I'm not disagreeing with @Kestrel but I'm not in charge here.

I'm saying that, as minimal as the rules are, Tyche kept breaking them and getting warnings, and his response to that was to do the same thing but maybe not quite breaking exactly what the rules were for a little while until he did, and then getting another warning that the warning after that would be even more strongly worded.

And I'm saying that someone who does that will always, always, always be a drain on any online community until they cross whatever line the moderators decide to set for flushing them.

@Jeshin there's also a thing that, even in the most IC-is-IC complete separation zero OOC expectation collaboration playstyle...

Okay, so a possibly apocryphal D&D story. Our heroes can see a room at the end of the hall, with a pile of gold in the middle. Naturally suspicious, they start asking questions. Is the treasure magical? Are there monsters in the hallway? I detect invisibility, does that show me anything? They go through their whole paranoia checklist, and start in toward the treasure... and the DM tells them to roll initiative, they never asked if there was a monster on the pile of treasure fnar fnar fnar and the ancient Red Dragon is attacking.

When we RP, we make choices. Choices need to be based on information from scene-runners and RP partners. If I'm playing a character in a committed relationship and they're cheating on their partner, it's incumbent on me to relay the relevant information to my RP partners that their character would have.

District Manager: You're over on hours compared to payroll matrix. Bring your schedule into compliance.

Me/Store Manager: Changes made, submitted for approval.

DM: Your coverage is light. Put people on at these times.

M/SM: Changes made, submitted for approval.

DM: You're over on hours compared to payroll matrix. Bring your schedule into compliance.

M/SM: Changes made, submitted for approval.

DM: Your coverage is light.

M/SM: THOSE ARE THE OPTIONS, YES.

(Okay it was YOU who interrupted my double posts responding to you)
@ganymede said in Sensitivity in gaming:

@insomniac7809 said in Sensitivity in gaming:

Now, TTRPGs were, for a fairly long time, designed for by and for an audience of white men. (The MU* scene has been a lot more gender-balanced, in my experience, which might be an interesting topic to get into.)

Now this is a good talking point.

I am of the unsupported opinion that the MUSH scene is far more gender-balanced than the TTRPG world. Like, far more balanced. I would lay a wager that there are more women and LGBTQ+ folks playing on MUSHes than cis-hetero-men. I'd lay a heavy wager on that.

Why? I think it's fairly easy to figure out.

Yeah? I think it's really interesting, actually. @Aria and I met on an online game, but it was a JavaChat game hosted on White Wolf's website, with a very different 'channel' into the game that the MUSH scene, and the playerbase was predominately (not overwhelmingly) male. To the point that the sarcastic comments about crossplaying was almost exclusively discussing lesbians walking around in catsuits and negligee, rather than Yaoi prettyboys. I've wondered if women are the majority in the MU* games because they tend to come from freeform text RP, rather than the wargame scene.

...unless you mean that the TTRPG scene tends to be male-dominated because it's unwelcoming to women, in which case, yeah, depressingly obvious. I do think it's made a lot of headway since the days when @Aria was basically offered free gaming space in a game store if she'd run "talk to a live girl" games to draw business, but yeah.

To me, this is why policing is so very important. Like, way more important than I ever thought it would be. I can honestly say that of my near 25 years playing the past decade has been the most enjoyable. It's not because I have abandoned World of Darkness games -- okay, that may be part of it? -- but it is because the people that I have run into have taught me so much about ... well, everything.

It's important to me that LGBTQ+ folks have a place to be LGBTQ+ without fear. It's important that women aren't stalked or harassed on these games. I may be one of the toughest old birds out there when it comes to bullshit but that does not mean everyone is or should be. On this board, I'm happy to talk and share with people with divergent views from mine because I know I'll learn something new along the way, no matter how dry, acerbic, and condescending I am.

Gaming is good. It's really good. And to keep it that way, taking an extra step towards making the hobby better for others? That's a good thing.

It is. Gaming is good. And the chance to meet people through gaming is also good. In 2021 (I said "2020" above, it's been a month you'd think I'd get that) the ability to meet people from literally anywhere in the world is better than it's been in any time in human history, and that's a really, really good thing.

Which is why--besides the "irresponsible" bit I said above, which I do stand by--I do think it's important to be careful with material depicting other people and cultures. If someone comes into what is, mostly, a "men's space" or a "white space" and sees that they're represented as an ugly caricature of a person, I don't blame them if their response is "fuck this like the gold medalist fucklympian at the 2021 Fuckistan Fucklympics." So they lose gaming, and we lose someone who could be part of our thing and maybe give us some new perspective. Everyone loses.

***tangential, sexual assault***

So, as these sorts of spaces start to open up beyond the groups that have dominated them, it can be tricky for some of us to find the boundaries. And sure, sometimes people are going to place their boundaries in a place that's not reasonable, at least for the social circle. People do that. But, it's so very, very often the case that when some of us think that "this was always fine before, suddenly this is a problem," it's more accurately "this was always a problem for a whole lot of people, I just didn't have to hear about it." That's really what so much of the whole thing is with "sensitivity readers" and the like, listening to people and behaving in a way that considers others. Like any social interaction.

People mentioned how a lot of the sex comedies in the nineties would be unacceptable these days. (Molly Ringwald wrote a while ago on watching Breakfast Club with her granddaughter and seeing herself being the target of all that adorable sexual assault by the guy she falls in love with at the end.) There's been a lot of pushes toward inclusivity in SF writing and video games, making them less of a space by and for cishet white guys. And then we've been getting the backlash, with people trying to make SFF and video games stay men's spaces.

That's why I was quite so vitriolic about the video linked at the start of this discussion. I do think it's a discussion worth having (God, I hope it is, or this would be a hell of a way to spend my Thursday afternoon) even if I've made my stance fairly clear (God, I hope this all makes some kind of sense). The channel, though, is part of a whole internet ecosystem of gamer guys who take any video game protagonist who isn't a generically-rugged brown-haired guy in his thirties or any female character that doesn't give them a half chub as soon as she juggles onto the screen as a personal attack and proof that gaming is being ruined by SJWs. Even though it actually doesn't hurt them at all if women are made more welcome as gamers. Anyone capable of uploading a video about how making Tifa's tits smaller is Orwellian thought policing has access to infinite CGI titties at any waking moment of their lives. They're mad that they aren't being exclusively catered to.

@greenflashlight said in Sensitivity in gaming:

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.

Oh, absolutely. I kind of glossed over this in my rambling, but I did say that the worst offenders with the widest reach are the ones who suffer least from people trying to hold them accountable. CK is on shitlists for being an actual sexual predator, not for anything in his routines, and as you say he is not "cancelled" in any meaningful sense.

As I said, the only people who really seem to be subjected to "cancelling" are small creators, and mostly the ones who are working in a more "social justice" space, where that sort of reputation can actually hurt them. (Thinking of stuff like requires_hate's mobs back when.) People who are willing can make being "cancelled" a YouTube career.

Other than that... the only real "cancelation" I can think of was the Dixie Chicks.

I hear a lot of pop music at work. (I work at a mall.) And there's just two things that keep getting on my nerves.

One is the sad songs where the viewpoint character is super bummed that the object of their affection is either not interested, or is in a committed relationship with someone else. And I mean I get it, it sucks, we've all been there. But when he starts singing about how she should totally get with him instead, it leaves mournfully sweet and gets into entitled creepster.

The second is when they're trying to use Romeo and Juliet for any sort of love song. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, dammit. It's not just a love story, it's a love story that ends with the protagonists and all their friends dead. Star-cross'd lovers doesn't mean that they were really really in love, it means they were cursed by fate. I mean, it's cool if you're singing about a bad breakup or something, but not if you're just using them as shorthand for 'really in love.' Even if someone's parents don't approve. Read a goddamn book, Taylor.

@Arkandel said in Game of Thrones:

@Ghost said in Game of Thrones:

Man, I am such a Lena Headey fan. She's really brought out the character and is the perfect Cersei.

Watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Man, I miss that show.

Or be the sixth person to see her knock it out of the fucking park in Dredd.

@mietze Any other time, I'd say that assumptions of conspiracy are over the top. Almost literally any other time.

@Groth said in Good or New Movies Review:

@GreenFlashlight said in Good or New Movies Review:

My position is, I don't think you should say you're an ally if you're not willing to do things an ally would do. Lying is generally a bad thing.

When has Disney ever said they are an ally? Their only political position has ever been profit.

They've definitely been trying to cash in on inclusivity--see LeFou from the Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, and also for everything wrong with their approach to it.

Yes, it's true that giant multinational empires are only in it for the profit. Right now they're trying to cash in on inclusivity as a vehicle for it, and they've taken some very big strides for representation (eg, making the main characters of their new Star Wars trilogy a black man and a woman). Media and pop culture do matter; they help shape the way we see the world. (Yes, I know, you (the reader) are super-rational and know the difference between fiction and real life. Apropos of nothing, the "one call from jail" isn't a thing, at all, it was just something writers made up.)

Right now, representation is profitable to Stateside audiences. And that is, on balance, a good thing. But Disney still wants them sweet sweet Singapore dollars so they have to consider the sensibilities of foreign censors for their big tentpole films.

So while it's true that "Disney" (the corporate entity) has no political allegiance, their pursuit of profit has them giving mealy-mouthed deniable inclusions to try and present themselves as LGBTQ allies, while not actually doing anything that would raise heckles in an anti-LGBTQ authoritarian regime (at least not after thirty seconds in an editing room). It's perfectly reasonable to complain that the result is a condescending, underhanded load of taff.

ETA: It is also possible that deniable representation in film is the work of genuine creatives working within the constraints of a studio system that restricts what can be allowed in the text.

@GreenFlashlight Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

As far as I'm concerned, wallflower and/or lone wolf PCs are well and good, if the players are ready and willing to take on what that means--which is, less interactivity in a game of interpersonal interaction.

And don't put it on other players to jump that gap. I've been on way too many games where Darksoulle Blakk sits in the corner all broody, gives hostile one-word responses to anyone who tries to include them, and quits in a huff because there's nothing for them to do. Nobody actually gives a shit about the dark torment of your character's dark tormented soul, guy. Not without a reason beyond "he's so silent and brooding and unresponsive, I must know what happens behind the mirrorshades."

People who want to play Gregory House/Rick Sanchez also need to be aware that they're not the protagonist of a collaborative game, and like in the real world, there's probably someone else who can do what they can without being an insufferable assbucket about it. If you drive off everybody, it probably won't be them crawling back to you when it shakes out.

@shincashay said in RL Anger:

There's enough laid out to cast some serious side-eye at the nomination.

Kavanaugh flipped his shit and swore vengeance against the Democratic party in his confirmation hearings. In a sane universe the President would have withdrawn his nomination already if he lacked the good grace and basic decency to step down himself on that basis alone, even aside from the truth of the allegations.

But we live in Stupidest Timeline so who the fuck even knows.

I usually start with a base concept or archetype. Sometimes (often) that'll boil down to "basically <character> in <setting>." I like twists on archetypes, but going completely off the rails just strikes me as pointless--why would I play a Ventrue if I just wanted to play them as a Bruja?

I usually keep background as minimal as I can during CG, which is sometimes a strain on @Aria and other people who like things set out in advance. I just like to make it up in play, once I figure out what makes sense for the PC. Until I get a feel for it, I don't like nailing things down beyond a few character-defining points.

I try to keep my PCs pretty well-rounded, even when it's suboptimal from a min-max standpoint. I'd rather have a PC who can hold a conversation and read beyond a fifth grade level and whatever their deal is than someone who can do one thing better than everyone. I also tend to buy above-average intelligence, unless being kinda dim is part of the concept.

I don't have an issue with reusing character traits. Or, for that matter, remaking characters wholecloth. (FIGHT ME) If I don't have a specific concept in mind, I'll fall back on some of the same tropes more often than not. (Sarcastic, verbose, often criminal, usually an anti-authority streak.) Should note that my only current PC is pretty much the polar opposite of that in every respect... I pretty much have to Karl Urban the dialogue on every pose I make. (Possibly relevant that @saosmash made the character as a roster, I just play the guy.)

I usually do come up with one or two character flaws for a given PC, things that are just flat-out negative, but most of their 'flaws' come up in play as aspects of their personality that you can't really separate from their strengths. Like, he's either indomitabley resolute or pig-headedly stubborn, depending on the circumstances and PoV.

ETA: oh, and unless it's baked into the concept, I usually play my characters as having been at their thing a while. Doesn't mean they need to react to impending apocalypsi with "oh, it's Tuesday already?" (unless that's earned in-game), but I usually play PCs where this isn't their first rodeo. I'm making someone ex nihilo to go in this situation, and anything that makes it feel like they have a history helps my immersion.

@auspice

"As' chairman of the, Merchant's' Guild gentlemen may, I point out that these thing's represent a valuable labor force in this' city—" said Mr. Robert Parker.*

*As a member of the Ancient and Venerable Order of Greengrocers, Mr. Parker was honor-bound never to put his punctuation in the right place.

-Terry Pratchett, Making Money

@insomnia said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

I mean in all honestly, I see SJW as a slur. Well slur is probably strong. I honestly get wanting to make change, and make things better for people, but the people who have adopted the title, the vocal minority of assholes have ruined it. Kinda like how the Swastika was a luck symbol, I don't understand why people would willingly say they are a SJW after most people view it so badly. So yeah for me, if I ever were to call someone an SJW it would be meant as an insult.

This is veering off topic, but... I call myself an SJW because a) the sort of people who use SJW as an insult are the sort of people I'm quite content to be insulted by, for the most part, and b) it's fucking awesome. Seriously. A warrior of justice. That's a fucking superhero. Why would I be insulted because somebody wants to call me a superhero?

@aria I can stop any time I want.