Best posts made by insomniac7809

@Wretched #lifehack

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

I just want to know if I'm a bad person for liking the s' instead of s's

It makes you a good person.

It makes you a righteous person.

Strunk and White's overhyped pocket book is a collection of idiosyncratic preferences boldly presented as universal truths and stodgy rules so removed from the English language as it's used that the authors keep breaking them even as they present them.

It can be more than one thing!

Slightly more seriously, yes, you're absolutely right; the horror is, in a large part, that Helen is forced to actually live what she's been ignoring, or treating as an object of academic study. One that, even when she was aware of it, was always something over there. (There's the one scene where she's walking out of the police station after she's identified the "real" Candyman, where she's making comments about the fact that the police didn't give a shit until he attacked a white person from the right part of town. It's her black best friend who's trying to brush it off and move on with their lives. "Yes, white girl, I know, take the win.") You have a recurring thing where we're contrasting Helen's First World Problems (worrying that her husband's flirting with students, getting into pissing matches over dinner with a tenured professor) with day to day life in the projects that she visits to get material for her dissertation.

I'm not saying that Candyman handled things badly. It is, as I've said, one of my favorite movies ever made. It had something to say, and it said it really well; Tony Todd included "truth to power" in the tweet he sent out to give the new movie his blessing, when he thought he'd been recast. (A class act, even more so when I know that they absolutely wanted him back in the title role.)

I'm just thinking about the fact that what it was saying, it said from the position of a white writer/director, through the lens of a white middle-class academic who approached the story as an outsider. I'm really interested to see the story continued from the perspective of a black creative team, with a black protagonist; where this is their history that the story is about.

@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

I do think that self-diagnosis (or "self-assessment" is a better term) has its place
when you approach things from a perspective of struggles and strategies.

If you struggle with the same things that ADHD brains struggle with, the strategies that help ADHD brains may help you too, even if your struggles are actually caused by something other than ADHD. In many cases, the label is less important than finding tools that help you.

Totes (GD "totes" doesn't ping Chrome's spellcheck), and while I see how I might have suggested I was, it wasn't my intent to say people shouldn't self-assess. Like I said, we can share sympathy and coping strategies whether or not someone has a diagnosis, and a lot of the same shit is likely to be helpful (up to and including 'this is a brainmeats issue not a failure of character').

I'm just saying, when it comes to things like "<lived experience> seems different from what's being described, I'm confused about whether or not I have this," I wanted to be clear that the response here has to be "I cannot say whether or not you do, because I am not a doctor even a little tiny bit and if I was then a diagnosis in these circumstances would be a gross violation of ethics."

But as you say, that in no way interferes with the exchange of strategies, struggles, and sympathies.

@Wretched Which is great, until I need to explain to someone else why talking about their pet has got me thinking of a 1989 horror film I saw in 2008.

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

This is actually one of my biggest problems with this idea of 'cancel culture'. Really, as far as I can tell, it's just capitalism in operation. If I don't like an author, I don't buy their books. If enough people do that, they become unprofitable

(Well, that's technically market economics, which isn't the same thing as capitalism, but that's a whole different can of worms...)

So there is a tendency I've seen in some online spaces, where the ability of the public to reach quasi-public figures over social media or other online spaces can be an issue. Especially when claims can be manufactured or faked easily (it is really simple to make a fake tweet), and when the outrage can spread from someone who did a thing, to people in some way affiliated with someone who did a thing, to people associated with people affiliated with someone who did a thing.

I do see a difference between "I am not going to buy the thing," and from there "I am going to not buy the thing and encourage people to also not buy the thing," with people brigading someone's mentions because they're Kevin Bacon-associated with someone who did a thing or because they heard an unsourced claim that their target did something wrong. This is the sort of "cancel culture" I can see as a problem, and not one I know how to work at fixing.

I don't see "cancel culture" as related to the Star Trek thing, though. Big properties tend to avoid bringing in plot elements that seem to hit too close to a sensitive spot.

In 2001, for instance, the Twin Towers were edited out of everything from Raimi's first Spider-Man film to the Sex & the City intro, the entire finale of Lilo & Stitch was reanimated to swap out the 747 for a space alien ship, and the Simpsons New York episode was pulled from reruns for a decade. The whole subgenre of Emmerich-style ID4-wannabe "buildings go boom" action films was retired until '05 War of the Worlds (where the presentation was, ah, different) and didn't really make a comeback until 2009 with 2012.

Some sensitivity to what audiences will, en masse, be comfortable with and what constitutes "too soon" us as you say, just business sense.

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

I'll go out on a limb and say that... at least 70% of people don't know where it comes from.

Although if we ask ourselves "this thing is popular with The Youngs of America, where did it come from?" at any point in the last century or so, lacking evidence to the contrary, we're usually safe to assume the answer is "black people."

Achieving something of lasting importance is the highest goal in life
Strongly Agree - Agree - Slightly Agree - Slightly Disagree etc

motherfucker I'm doing a questionnaire for a phone center job and you're getting way too existential for this bullshit

"How much does this cost?"

Does it have a price tag on it with a dollar amount listed?

Based on that, might you be able to make a guess?

So I start a new job on Monday. Retail supervisor still, but better than the one I've had since March. (& that better than being unemployed after my last company folded up.)

This job is like the poster boy for "nobody wants to work for you anymore" that's been going on the last few months. Management pay isn't terrible but the associates are getting minimum wage with a chance of commission, so we're supposed to have at least five but we have one and she's the teen daughter of one of the third keys.

The District Manager was in today talking about how he thought they'd start getting applications in again after the eviction moratorium expires. And that's my actual peeve. Dream big I guess; "this job is better than homelessness, so we are entitled to a steady supply of applicants."

@Kodiak said in Tyche Banned:

But @Tyche kept telling us he wasn't a racist!

And that he'd never heard of any of the places he posted his alt-right poop from, and that it was just a weird coincidence that he kept linking to "news" sites that have "ISRAEL DID 9/11" on their home page, and that all his funny memes about what dumb bitches women are were just random jokes he felt like sharing.

Tyche should've been banned a year ago, but better late than never.

@bobotron I think this is underselling it a bit. It's definitely true that Paradox was interested in White Wolf as transmedia IP first, second, and last, but they'd seemed content to let the RPG crews play in their sandbox. Up to a point. (That point being 'at least one shitstorm of controversy per release of what's supposed to be making our new IP look good.')

@autumn said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

@packrat said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

Just being a huge jerk to people is unpleasant, being say, a huge jerk to commoners as a noble in a manner that makes it obvious you as the player think your character is a tool? That can work really well.

I feel like this is a really important thing. If other players understand that you think your own character is a jerk, you can get away with a lot. ...

On the other hand, it's not a get out of jail free card. I met a guy once who openly acknowledged that his character was a jerk, and, sure enough, when I RP'd with him the character was so jerkish that I had no desire to interact with him again.

Yeah, that's the thing with antisocial PCs. Whether they're the silent type, a wallflower, or just a prolapsed asshole of a human being. (I've had a whole lot of fun with all three, mind.)

First, you need to accept that you might not get the same degree of RP as a friendlier, more social PC. It's a cool thing to for other people to flex a bit to include you, it's cool if you flex a bit to be available, but you're deliberately cutting yourself off from some RP.

The other question is why your asocial skin is going to get any attention. Does the wallflower come out of their shell over certain topics? Is the asshole entertaining to be around for people who can take the odd dig at their own expense? Can the silent type carry their half of the scene without being overly wordy? How will your PC engage with other players, other than digging their heels in and refusing to interact?

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

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

@insomniac7809 said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

People on busses who think their bags get a seat.

on the subway, too. grr

Esp. when the bus is crowded. If the bus is mostly empty, sure! By all means!
But when it's crowded goddamnit put your bag on your lap.

Or at least don't act like I'm the asshole when I ask you to move it.

Especially if I phrase it as "excuse me, could I sit there?" rather than "move your shit, fucknugget, you can goddamn well see how packed this is."

@faraday There is also a thing that...

Well. Just now, I wanted to post a dumb thing about Arx.

It's not mean. It's not shit-flinging. It's not anything that needs to be in the HogPit. But that's where the Arx megathread is so that's where I went.

@jennkryst said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

Obligatorally chiming in because I half-min-max... but it's rarely for combat efficiency or the like. It's almost always done when a game's chargen and xp advancement ratio is different. To explain to the five people on the forum who dont know the concept, and to use the nWoD math... two characters start, one with 1/1/1/1, and the other with 4/0/0/0. Player one needs to spend 27 XP (6 + 9 + 12) to get to 4/1/1/1; player two needs to spend 9 XP (3 + 3 + 3).

And I hate--hate--this because it means that...

So, okay, I want to make a PC who's an unquestioned master of the blade, educated in natural philosophy, and disarmingly erudite, but I don't have the starting character resources. Fair enough! I'll make a character who's an expert at the blade, familiar with natural philosophy, and an apt conversationalist, and work from there.

Except... if I make an unquestioned master of the blade who's about as educated as an especially oblivious rock and with half the charm, I'll be playing the character I actually want to be playing in half the time. Making a less-good version of the character I want to play, rather than a different character who can become the PC I wanted in the first place with time and character resource investment, is the wrong decision and I can prove it mathematically.

Which, generally, is my problem with Min/Max-ing. Not that it's a bad thing to want your PC to be good at the thing they're good at, but I would like to have a character who is a functional human being also, please and thank you. And technically, sure, no one's making me min/max my own PC, but if it's established as an expectation in a given game the options amount to keeping up or falling behind; excuse me if I'm embittered by the fact that making a starting PC with a range of skills to reflect a lived experience in-setting is strictly inferior to rolling up a monosyllabic illiterate who always smells faintly of bad eggs but is really good at shooting.

Although, to be clear, my first snark will always be toward the game system, rather than the players who choose to make the clearly optimal choice.

(Last, perhaps peevishly, I might suggest that if I'm to see familiarity with the game system as a positive good, as the Reddit link suggests, the DM should be running something better than D&D5 oh snap indeed i went there)

@arkandel said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@rebekahse said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I'm confused why we seem to have decided that's self-evident but a character being a sexist or a racist is legitimate cause for OOC concern.
It's way easier to be triggered by something that has actually happened to you or someone you know. But how does that relate to gaming when that's just an IC point of view not shared by players? Well, that's what this thread is about.

Well, ideally it's an IC view not shared by players. But we've all seen people who play creepers, who use the IC screen to try to legitimize creeping on women across the screen. Right?

There are some people who don't want to see hateful, hurtful, ugly words targeting people like them used during their pretendy funtimes. There are some people who want to use those words and use the character as a shield. There are some people who just think the barrier for proving they aren't in the second group needs to be higher than logging in from the other side of the planet and apping a character.

I do see a pretty big gap between hating shav'arvani or the goddamn metahumans vs. insisting that using the n-word as a comma is just historically accurate, guys.

I'm peeved that my laser eye surgery does not mean surgery to get laser eyes like Cyclops.

Right now, Ex3 only has Solars, Dragon-Blooded, and Lunars as viable PCs.

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say "DB game!" Partly because DB rule, partly because there's enough of a social structure around them that you don't run into the problem that the narrative and mechanical role of the Celestials is "break the world over my knee and remake it in my image."

@surreality said in Roleplayer's shower thoughts:

@prototart said in Roleplayer's shower thoughts:

idk if it counts but a conversation about underwear for like She-Hulk style characters led to a conversation about the market for super-people clothes led to "there would definitely be shops aimed at superheroines" "yeah but basically nobody would ever be dumb enough to make a char out of that other than me and I'm def not gonna do that"

which led to me making a character out of that

...and clearly this person has not heard of Edna Mode, who is one of the most amazingly awesome characters in a movie in more or less forever. NO CAPES!

(I would totally do this, too.)