Posts made by insomniac7809

@Roz said in MSB Peeves:

Coke has a whole museum there, not just bottling and whatnot. It's got the historical caché of having kind of invented modern soda, which is probably the reason for the difference.

Also, I mean, it's Atlanta what else are they gonna brag about.

@Auspice said in MSB Peeves:

@insomniac7809 said in MSB Peeves:

@Thenomain said in MSB Peeves:

I do not understand why people get up in arms about pop/soda/Coke. Except that "Coke" is a proper noun and should not be used as a collective noun.

Now excuse me, my allergies are making me sneeze my head off. Hand me some kleenex while I google a remedy.

Someone who says "pop" sounds like they're going to meet that cute boy/girl from third period at a diner to split a banana sundae in 1956.

Calling it "coke" is dumb because I need to clarify if I actually mean a coke or if I mean something else to get the kind of soda I want. That doesn't apply to "Kleenex" because the only people who have ever or will ever give a shit if their tissues are Kleenex-brand are employed at Kleenex's marketing department, and it doesn't apply to googling things because a) it's a verb, no one calls Bing "a google" and b) obviously I am using Google.

lemme bing that

You should see if Microsoft is still paying people to use that phrase.

@Thenomain said in MSB Peeves:

I do not understand why people get up in arms about pop/soda/Coke. Except that "Coke" is a proper noun and should not be used as a collective noun.

Now excuse me, my allergies are making me sneeze my head off. Hand me some kleenex while I google a remedy.

Someone who says "pop" sounds like they're going to meet that cute boy/girl from third period at a diner to split a banana sundae in 1956.

Calling it "coke" is dumb because I need to clarify if I actually mean a coke or if I mean something else to get the kind of soda I want. That doesn't apply to "Kleenex" because the only people who have ever or will ever give a shit if their tissues are Kleenex-brand are employed at Kleenex's marketing department, and it doesn't apply to googling things because a) it's a verb, no one calls Bing "a google" and b) obviously I am using Google.

@krmbm

I've agreed to take shifts this week at another location.

I'm fairly sure the people who chose this site as a retail location and set up the off-site storage did so as some form of elaborate prank.

@Ghost said in How to pronounce FYI?:

I got somethin' for his punk ass
(That Sublime lyric always feels off)

Off how? It's the world's most mellow anthem to fantasizing about physically abusing your ex-girlfriend and murdering her new beau.

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

@Arkandel But he's backed up by Tucker Carloson's propaganda rag citing a blogger. A climate blogger.

@Tyche said in RL Anger:

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

Good news everyone!

This July was the hottest month in recorded history.

No wait, that's not good news.

I could have sworn it was July 1936. For the US that is. But they keep changing the data though.

The 1936 heat wave lost its spot (highest average monthly temperature across the continental USA) in July 2012. Your information appears to be seven years out of date.

@Rinel said in Good TV:

@insomniac7809 said in Good TV:

Also, the writers were aware of the issues with fridging in the comics, which was one of the reasons for the big twist

Which twist? I haven't read the comics and don't plan to.

***=NSFW content/big ol' spoiler***

So just bringing up another couple points about The Boys now that I've finished it...

Apparently, the Starlight plot with the Deep was actually changed from its original version because the Weinstein stories actually hit while they were writing the show. They'd planned on having it settled behind closed doors but wound up changing it to going public to reflect the current state of what they were working from.

Also, the writers were aware of the issues with fridging in the comics, which was one of the reasons for the big twist.

"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?"

@Arkandel said in Good TV:

Ennis' Hellblazer run is downright iconic

See, Hellblazer is the thing about Ennis. He wrote Dangerous Habits which might well be the Hellblazer story. He wrote the birthday party and Rake at the Gates of Hell. He wrote Kit, for God's sake.

He also write Son of Man. So... yeah.

(Remember? That's the one where John looks at the reader and announces "I'm shagging a lesbian; do I get a prize?" And the one where
***=ewww***

Ennis is always gonna Ennis but you can't let him get too Ennis or you get Son of Man.

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.

@gryphter I mean, speaking as an unpublished would-be writer and a cishet white dude...

...and with the important caveat that you're not committing some mortal sin by sticking to your demographics in pretendy funtimes...

The overly pat, often-repeated aphorism that "the trick to writing women is to write them as people" is pretty much entirely correct. The basic sentiment applies more or less across whatever demographic you're talking about.

Like, yes, different people have had different lived experiences and that shapes their outlook and personality. Of course, a cishet white dude who grew up in a rural town and joined the Marines is also going to have a different lived experience than my nerdy suburbanite upbringing, but that never seems to carry the same sort of stigma, or the same perception of an unapproachable divide.

So, sure, consider the character's identity in terms of how they'd act. But if I'm handing out any advice, I'd say to err on the side of underdoing it versus overdoing it if you're in doubt. Like, try to avoid the pitfall of worrying about whether a character's portrayal is sufficiently female/ queer/ ethnic, worry more if you're overdoing what you'd think of as "typical" for the demographic.

And I'm trying to avoid sounding condescending with this next bit, but, like... we all know people outside of our demographics, right? Like, as a cis white guy, I have a mother and a wife, at the very least. I have friends and coworkers who are women, gay, black, various combinations of the above. I figure most people can say something similar! So try to draw from that, instead of basing our portrayals on fictional characters based on other fictional characters based on stereotypes by straight white dude authors. (There's also the option of drawing from fiction or nonfiction by members of the demographics. It's out there!)

I mean, there's nothing wrong with considering things like women's pockets or men's discomfort with physical proximity. But you're probably better off glossing over it than you are getting lost in the weeds about that sort of thing.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

Especially if you take away the gender part and instead insert race/ethnicity or sexuality. If you are a white person playing a POC on a game and you don't give any thought to who that person's background has effected them you might find yourself walking straight into stereotypes.

Yeah, to a degree, but at the same time... like, every woman I've known who's read ASoI&F has commented that no, George, no woman spends that much of her day thinking about her own titties. The accidental stereotypes come, in my experience, from writers thinking too much about how an <X> character's <X>-ness would color absolutely every interaction, more than from not considering it at all.

So, say, if we're talking about ethnic stereotypes, it might not be ideal if I play as a black person while barely giving any consideration to their ethnicity, but I don't think it would be as bad as if I were writing every line of description and dialogue with the consideration that I need to be emphatically clear that they're black.

Having the new CEOs address their memo to "the <company> family when the subject of the memo involves a round of layoffs in the corporate structure--many of them 5-15 year employees who've uprooted and moved states for their positions--is tone-deaf and dumb as fuck.

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

@insomniac7809 said in Alternate Universes, OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fanfic:

If we're really getting into classical crossover fanfic, though, we have to talk about Jason and the Argonauts.

"Every culture hero from the Greek city-states team up and have an adventure."

Now I just imagine the classical version of AO3, but instead of leaving comments people cluster around the Jason fanfic author to shout that the author is clearly getting this characterization wrong, because Hercules is totally not with Hylas and wouldn't leave the quest for him, because Hercules/Iolaus OTP, no Hercules/Megara OTP, are you kidding that relationship was so unhealthy, etc. And then one person starts screaming "UPDATE PLS!"

"Which poleis get to have their culture heroes on the boat" was a serious political statement for a while.

And if we're going into classical shipper territory, "was Achilles or Patroclus the top" was something 5th- and 4th-century BCE playwrights and philosophers liked to argue.

(Seriously, it shows up in the Symposium.)