Posts made by insomniac7809

Not gonna lie, if I need to read an ethnography to roll up a PC I probably won't.

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Playing a character on a MU is not writing a character in a story. At least not as far as I'm concerned. It is embodying a character through word and action in a real-time interaction with other people.

I don't really see that as being different? MU* storytelling will be a bit... fast and loose, obviously, compared to a written work that undergoes revision and editing, but ultimately the same sort of thing.

A good story invites us to identify with the characters "on-screen" to at least some degree, and the creator (by necessity) is the one who embodies them in their creation.

...but this is a bit off-topic, I guess

@onigiri So, I think this is a bit funny...

One time @Aria and I were driving home from my parents' house, and she needed to read The Rats in the Walls for a class, so I was reading it aloud from the passenger seat while she drove.

It's a really good story, but it kept fucking up the pacing when I gave this big Kiff Croaker sigh every time the cat's name came up.

@surreality said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

White Wolf -- back in the oWoD days of OMFGWTF were they thinking?! -- was trying to incorporate everyone and everything in part to 'invite everyone into the game'.
It, uhm. Yeah. It did not go so well, regardless of the intention.

Which was a good one. I have no real doubt about that.

And there have been strides made since, boosted by the fact that it is so much easier to hire authors from different countries, rather than have everything done by a handfull of white boys in Georgia with a library card.

But yeah, I can defend their intentions, but there's no defending what happened.

ETA: Actually... at the risk of shoving my foot entirely down my throat...

I will offer some defense of early WW, just because they tried to break the RPG presumption of "straight white man" that was very much set in 1992. Even something as simple as defaulting to "she" in most of the example text and using women as sample characters and NPCs, something like two years after TSR had published their corebooks with sidebars defending the use of "he" as a universal neutral default. They tried to get a more diverse crowd into their games, and while we don't have census numbers for RPGs, it seems like they were hugely successful in getting women into the hobby.

...and at the same time, yes, their attempts at racial inclusivity were frequently ham-fisted, misguided, and offensive to the races they were depicting.

@Rinel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

I mean it to say that if I fuck up on Rinel (and boy have I fucked up), I'm just someone who doesn't understand Oathlands culture. If I fuck up on Marion, I run the risk of being really offensive.

Which is also something I've considered in WoD games, especially since my PC defaults are frequently some variant on "petty criminal." The optics on that are different if I make the character a PoC.

I've also been mulling over how I play Thesarin, just because the "barbarian" fantasy tropes have some uncomfortable origins.

I don't know. Maybe more people could consider making their PC something other than their own phenotype, just because why not. It doesn't need to be a Statement about the X experience (probs should just not be from a not-X).

Plus... I don't know. The biggest valley girl I know IRL is second-generation Chinese. While I get that people have problems playing across gender, my big secret for going undetected as "dude playing a lady PC" is "don't bring up her tits unprompted."

@Wretched #lifehack

@Tinuviel In conclusion, academia is a land of contrasts.

@surreality Someone should get on that.

@LittleLizard Nice.

Maybe keep the last caption up for a few more frames? I had to let it loop a couple times to catch it.

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

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

Did you not get the "how to be horrible in Polite" primer before you unpacked?

Darling, that is more talent than skill.

Well, some of these places, it's either being taught or it's being bred.

@Atomic Did you not get the "how to be horrible in Polite" primer before you unpacked?

@RightMeow It's not true in this case, but it wouldn't be that weird if it was.

There was a skipping rhyme popular with the kids about a century back...

I had a little bird her
Name was Enza!
Opened up the window and
In!
Flew!
Enza!

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

I feel like I hyper-focus on all the things I should not. Then lack focus on the things I should.

Oh God yeah.

What's the best way to get me to do something I've been putting off for a month? Giving me something else I need to do by tomorrow.

@Aria Related peeve:

fuck-fucking fucker fuck my fucking eye fuck

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

So long as we understand what normal people consider to be an acceptable definition, why does it matter that unreasonable people will attempt to subvert its meaning?

I'm not convinced that we do know what normal people consider to be an acceptable definition. Language is use; no matter how snooty I am about how everybody but me is using "begs the question" wrong, it doesn't actually matter in terms of communicating.

So if "white knighting" keeps getting used to mean "anyone objecting to discrimination against subaltern groups they aren't in," and that's what it's understood to mean, that's what it means.

Maybe I'm wrong and it hasn't gotten to that point. I'm skeptical.

I think that, for all the fine lines we might want to put around what is or isn't "white knighting," it's gone the same way as "virtue signaling" and "SJW" in that it's now just a way for the Tyches of the world to attack anyone left of Mussolini as fake.

@Admiral

okay so yeah calling Catholics a hate group is fucked, but if people in the QUILTBAG aren't willing to just overlook the doctrines re: the queers I can't say I'll hold that against them?

idk it's kind of a big issue.

@Kestrel said in Covid-19 Gallows Humor:

It wasn't even very good gaslighting. He can surely come up with better lies than that.

To lift from the Avatar section of 2nd Edition Unknown Armies:

Taboos: Whatever doubt the Demagogue might feel, no matter what reservations might plague him privately, the Demagogue never admits he was wrong, especially not in public. There can be weaseling (“It now appears that I was given incorrect information—but the basic premises of my ideas are still as logical and rock-solid as ever . . .”) and waffling (“Oh, you misinterpreted what I said. Here’s what I meant . . .”) but any show of ideological softness is a break with the archetype.

This doesn’t mean the Demagogue can’t change his position or contradict himself. Far from it—all it means is that each change and contradiction has to be presented as the logical consequence of what went before. If you said the Information Superhighway was bad last Thursday and now you’re saying it’s good, that’s not a problem. You have many options. One is to explain that what you said last Thursday was deliberately misinterpreted by your enemies (the CIA, a crypto-fascist political conspiracy, the bleeding-heart liberal press, whoever).
The other is to simply bull your way through: “My position on the Information Superhighway has not changed, and I will not stand for these smears and accusations!”

Released in 2002, BTW. Just... putting that out there.