Best posts made by insomniac7809

I do it if I feel like it.

Fite me.

Dude. I know you don't want to be at work. That's why they pay you to do it.

I'm all for a bit of camradre-building grousing, but at a certain point... I dunno... suck it the fuck up and do your job?

@peasoupling said in Alternate Universes, OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fanfic:

A lot of Great Literary Classics are basically fanfiction. I mean, the Divine Comedy is self-insert fanfic, of all things.

"And then Virgil, who was now my bestie, took me to meet Homer and Ovid. And Virgil was like, 'hey guys, this is Dante, he's awesome.' And Homer was like, 'he is awesome, he should join our club.
"And also everyone I hate is in Hell."

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

First off, congratulations!

Thank you!

...elopement came up. But I think I'd die of my mother's silent not-angry-just-hurt.

(My dad would probably be p cool with it tho)

So my gut feeling is that, even if "no" isn't a default answer, it should be one staff is ready to give.

A game can & often should have a lot of things going on. You can have action, TS, horror, TS, personal plot, TS, mystery, and TS comfortably on the same game. It's fine if a given player is only interested in some subset of the whole deal. But it needs to feel like it could all be taking place in the same... work? Reference frame?

Anything collaborative is going to have some give and take as a core part of the experience. But that's why staff should be giving some boundaries for people to play in, as I see it. If I want to play a given MU*, presumably it's because I like the theme behind it. If staff doesn't put their foot down every now and then, it's... likely the theme will become unrecognizable fairly soon.

So, say, if I were making... iunno, a Wild West game in a frontier town. It's true that samurai were a contemporary thing for the period. A samurai who wound up halfway across the planet could even be a cool PC. But if half the players apped in samurai, at some point I feel like I'm barely running a Wild West game anymore.

To all the people who come into a retail establishment minutes before close just to 'see what you have,'

Speaking in the spirit of compassion and love due to all fellow travellers on this crazy jouney through the cosmos on a spinning ball of dirt, and recognizing that every living being contains a spark of what we call the divine,

You are all fucking garbage, I wish bad things on you and those you care for, and if you approach eating establishments with the same narcissistic disregard for the employees you deserve every drop of bodily fluid you have, I assure you, unknowingly consumed over the years.

@bored said in How can everyone play the same game?:

The other issue is the 'getting people to play the same way' problem (I think 'play the same game' is terrible phrasing- so long as you're logged in, using the game resources, and adhering to policy, you are absolutely playing the same game).

That's an... interesting question, although I think it's getting more into terminology than epistemology.

If there are two PCs who log onto the game, interact with no one but each other, are they playing the same game as everyone else?

What if they're doing things in their one-on-one RP that wouldn't pass staff's definition of theme, but nobody but the two of them ever know about it?

An exaggeration, but not by much, of some PCs I've seen on some games. I understand that Arx had issues with a certain knot of Thrax players who actually tried to limit how much staff learned about what they were doing, to keep theme policing from cracking down on some of their stuff.

We are--to wank philosophic about pretending to be a sexy vampire--trying to create a shared fictional space for us to participate in this collaborative fiction... improv... thing, If we don't have some shared baseline assumptions, we're not really engaging each other.

@Too-Old-For-This said in RL things I love:

@Wretched Hey, I still shop at Goodwill. There is NOTHING wrong with secondhand clothes.

@Ghost said in TS - Danger zone:

I mean, in theory, if I were writing a steamy romance novel I'd probably hand sample chapters to people including my own parents

Um, I wouldn't.

Not because of secret shame or anything but just because I don't need to ask questions about how horny any relatives of mine got.

At my place of business, the temperature seems to just be permanently set to 'wrong'

My $0.02:

If a RP rule is broken in a way that nobody ever finds out about, enforcement is both impossible and pointless.

If two players work out, IDK, an incest kink on Discord in violation of game policy, that falls into 'who knows who cares.'

If some third party brings this to Staff attention... my personal inclination and preference would be for staff and tattletale to mind their damn biznez.

But, if the players take the brotherfucking onto the grid (whether actually TSing or just making RP hay about the love I don't really need to hear about) then the banhammer is entirely justified.

Here's one of the best/worst coping strategies:

Have a big, important, long-term project.

See, if I need to do the dishes (ferex), I'll putz around on message boards and stream TV and put it off.

But when there was a term paper I needed to be writing, well, I'll get to it... but man those dishes need washing, I'll get to the research as soon as I'm done.

Doesn't help with the big stuff, but otherwise, it keeps me super productive!

@Tinuviel And springboarding off that...

"This behavior is disruptive and bad for everyone's collective good time" is a legit reason for a banning, whether or not the behavior technically falls in violation of subsection 2.a of article C of the game's posted code of conduct.

We are here to have a good time. We do not need to treat adjudication as if it were a criminal conviction.

Discussing Israel is a fucking minefield.

A great deal of anti-Semitic rhetoric is couched as criticism of Israel.

Even when it is not intended as anti-Semitic rhetoric, a great deal of criticism of Israel either uses talking points taken from anti-Semitic rhetoric that was couched as criticism of Israel, or unintentionally sounds a great deal like anti-Semitic rhetoric. (There's not as much daylight as we might like between "Israel exerts disproportionate influence on US policy" and "we are living under a ZOG").

This is compounded by both anti-Semites and certain pro-Israel groups being motivated to cast any aspirations against the state of Israel as anti-Semitic.

ETA: Having seen the cartoon in question: Bibi as a guide dog and Trump as a blind idiot would have been one thing. Putting a blue Star of David around Bibi's collar could maybe, maybe, maybe get benefit of the doubt as a symbol of Israel specifically. Putting Trump in a yarmulke, though? Yeah, that's a big ol' dog whistle, the Times was right to retract it and was right to apologize for it.

@Carex You're really not. Jumping from "keep fifteen-year-olds from being groomed by grown-ass adults" to "butterfly is trying to protect their kids from anything sexual" is just such a bad-faith leap.

@SG said in Game of Thrones:

I feel like everyone would be happy with the heel turn if it happened seconds before the bells sounded. Going ape after you've finally won is stupid and clearly insane. Going ape because the city just won't effing surrender, 'okay you mofos, you're going to burn' makes all the sense that the writers are trying to talk about. Even having the bells sounding while she's razing the town is fine and still in character for her, but doing it after the surrender makes no sense at all. "It's personal" wtf is that?

Yeah, the whole thing...

***And So He Spoke Spoilers***

The Italian, Irish, and German diasporas to the USA are a really interesting topic, IMO.

The short version is, these days we're all white, but back when we really weren't. The diaspora communities in the United States have formed their own unique identities over the last century or so over waves of immigration, even if the communities of European descent are becoming less of a distinct identifier as the cultural identity is absorbed into generically "white." Which, yes, often means that celebration of whatever heritage just turns into a drinking holiday in ethnic drag.

But at the same time... if the X-American culture has a tradition that we've developed and maintained that looks weird to the inhabitants of X, well, what do you guys have to do with it?

@Warma-Sheen said in Fandom and entitlement:

@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:

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.

This. Except what you call 'chickenshit' the execs call 'good business', like @Ghost said previously. If the last 3 years has shown anything, it is that hate is not extinct in the world. At all. Even a little bit. There are still many racists, bigots, and all manner of adjacent haters, all of whom are consumers. And not just in Western countries. There are plenty of movie dollars to be made all over the world, many of whom are no where near as "inclusive" as the US.

Trading smaller cash returns for openly acknowledging potentially scandalous text in a movie isn't good business. Even in Hollywood. Its sucks. But that's the world we live in.

"We wrote a gay couple but didn't acknowledge it" doesn't stop being chickenshit because it might annoy China or Russia.

@Jeshin Yeah, and that's something I'm sympathetic to, overall.

But usually when I've seen it in the wild, it's from the same people--or at the very least the same demographic--that was pushing the "pedophiles in the shrubbery" fears. The idea being, apparently, that Children Aren't Safe Unattended In These Fallen Days, not that their generation lost its collective shit over Stranger Danger (while not actually being more cautious around the youth pastor or the little league coach).

So I haven't finished The Boys but I'm willing to call it solid TV so far. A few of my thoughts:

• Definitely a timely production in the #metoo post-Cosby era.
• Treatment of female characters is decidedly mixed. The two central characters are both men driven by bad things happening to their non-character partner, which is un-great. La Femme is a very Whedonesque character, the feral damaged kickass waif. On the other hand, Starlight is a pretty excellent secondary protagonist.
• A lot of sexual violence in the show. Can see why it would be a turn-off for some people.
• The treatment of corporate juggernauts crushing the little people between the profit-generating gears is great. The fact that it's an Amazon production is not lost on me.
• The bleak tone, cynical plot, and dark humor is right up my alley.
• It does a really good job of humanizing everyone, although I wouldn't describe A-Train, the Deep, or Homelander as sympathetic. Just very well humanized and realized.
• Frenchie is fucking awesome.
• Homelander is fucking terrifying.
• I actually really like the change from the comics where the Boys don't have superpowers to compete.
• It does dial things down from the characteristic over-the-top Ennisisms, which is probably a good decision on the whole. Ennis is a fifty-year-old fourteen-year-old, and having an editorial hand to keep 'transgressive bleakness' from dropping into 'puerile self-parody' is more or less a necessity.
• Mark Millar licks goats.