@Rinel said in Game of Thrones:
I have heard that the ending of the season has been leaked. I have been exposed, unintentionally, to what an anonymous rando on the internet claimed to be the ending based on those leaks.
Said ending was so absurd that I do not think the anonymous rando was correct. But if the anonymous rando was correct?
HOO BOY
The anonyous rando was correct. Lol. What a complete disaster of a final season.
So is Lolita, but I don't want to fucking roleplay it, yo.
ETA: Jokes that center around the replacement of "fucking" in the previous sentence will be executed on sight.
Add me to the train of "now watching Deadwood because it actually is getting an ending."
I'll admit my religion has me sort of lukewarm to His Dark Materials. The ending just seems needlessly and hamfistedly antitheistic (which of course is the point), much like Lewis throwing Susan under the bus (or out of the way of the train, I suppose) seemed needlessly preachy.
I think it might actually just be bad writing, though, because even in my atheist years I was pretty unimpressed with the ending. The setting as a whole, though, is great.
Speaking of YA adaptations to the screen: Sabriel when
Damn, but y'all missed your calling as attorneys.
I don't think factory farming is ethically defensible unless you're willing to say that torturing animals for pleasure is ethically permissible. But I eat factory farmed food all the time. I'm a hypocrite.
I have no compunction whatsoever about killing and eating animals per se; it's their living conditions that concern me. Also, the environmental effects.
To that end, I'm beyond happy to see alternatives like the Impossible burger arise, though frankly I'm unironically hoping for monstrous flesh-vats of meat that can be continually carved away at for product.
Oh, as for what I eat--literally anything under 1900 calories per say. More peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than I should.
@Pandora said in TS - Danger zone:
Not looking at peoples' descs is a good way to wind up whitewashing people's characters of color, to miss character disabilities, to miss someone's MAGA t-shirt, someone's neo-Nazi tattoos, someone's 'I Beat Breast Cancer' pin, and so on
Yeah, as someone who plays a decent number of POCs and tries to put relevant information in my description, that kind of stings to read. Rinel's description is about 150 words long, and 100 of those are devoted to in-game events that have left her face scarred and leg crippled. I mean, I pose with the cane pretty much constantly, but I guess this sort of attitude makes me feel less guilty about talking about it. Her having visible scars is important to her character. Her being crippled is important to her character. Her having brown skin is important to me--and in modern games where race matters more than it does in Arx, my character's race is very important to them. Someone calling Yvette white is gonna get punched in the face by an angry robot lady who takes her creole heritage really fucking seriously.
tl;dr this attitude is makes me more likely to shove my character's description in people's faces, which I would really prefer to avoid doing
You aren't wrong. The hype over the Impossible burger is that it's competitively priced. Burger King is about to roll out an Impossible Whopper nationwide.
@Auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Macha said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
@Auspice My doctors want me to exercise more, but won't give me anything for the pain to help me do it (Fibro sucks!)
It's why I argue so hard for marijuana legalization.
A lot of prescription pain meds don't work on me or barely work (I always thought klonopin and tramadol were pretty much sugar pills and to this day I don't get what people see in them: I take one and it's like nothing happened) but weed can help me function (I have a really powerful cbd gel that works better than any anti inflammatory med I've ever taken).
Hold on a second. What horrible excuse for a doctor was prescribing klonopin for pain? That's a benzodiazepine. A really, really strong one. It's for seizures and crazies like me who panic at the drop of a hat--not pain.
@egg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Play a POC, it wouldn't kill you.
The character I've roleplayed the most in my life (Rinel Tern, theologian, literal Godbotherer, and generally cantankerous individual--come get into a fight with her on Arx today) is brown, and when I'm playing MMOs I tend to make my characters POCs.
Here's the thing, though. Those are fantasy worlds. It doesn't matter if my Jane Shepard is black, because by the time of Mass Effect it's species that matters, not race. It doesn't matter if Rinel looks like someone from India (except that maybe she'll not sunburn as easily?), because Arx is actually color blind.
But Marion, my second-gen Chinese immigrant character on Gray Harbor? I like Marion a lot, but playing them is hard. I have functionally no idea what it is like to grow up Chinese on the West Coast. I read a story as a kid about a girl who was embarrassed that she liked to eat fish eyes. I went to high school with a lot of first, second, and third gen immigrants (this is probably the most helpful thing). I try to read up on general cultural trends. But in terms of that lived experience?
I am not exaggerating when I say that it is easier to get into the head of Rinel Tern, a woman who literally punches demons, magically sees the movement of the wind in the sky, and yells at 800-year-old avatars of death and destruction for being rude than it is to play Marion. I don't mean this to say "oh wow people of color are totally alien and not understandable!" 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.
That doesn't mean I won't play POCs in real-world-adjacent settings. Obviously, I'll do that. But white folks should be aware that it deserves time and effort.
I'm enjoying THE BOYS so far. It's completely over the top, but I like the Watchmen-meets-Burn After Reading vibe I get from it.
@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Rinel Also excuse me, I totally tried to bang Rinel.
Wait... what
More substantively: your post is really good. Playing a black American is probably the thing I'm most afraid of doing. Living in Louisiana and seeing secondhand how fucked everything is just makes me feel like I would have to do a prohibitive amount of research on almost everything. But I am probably oversensitive due to working in one of the worse environments as regards racial equality (criminal law).
And as someone else pointed out, even good faith portrayals can call to mind blackface if you stumble.
Having watched Another Life and read all the universally negative reviews of it, I think it's safe to say that I have truly atrocious standards for television. I thought it was lots of fun.
I'm gonna watch the Expanse next.
@Ominous said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
The brilliant part is having a stat that influences how a character is played differently than human characters, so the other species aren't just humans with funny ears attached or hairier feet and smaller height.
But you can just do this by having well-developed cultures for the groups. I don't play my Malkavian differently from my Toreador because one has the derangement Sanguinary Aninism and the other has the bane of obsession over beauty; I play them differently because the clans are different. Mechanics are, at best, a subtle reinforcement of culture.
@Auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
tl;dr I'm going to start using 'You're welcome' more than 'No problem' because I'm worth it.
I say "no problem" for things that are literally no problem and "you're welcome" for things that are meaningful. And of course there's the context of where I am and what I'm doing. Holding a door open for someone is a "no problem." Doing anything in my professional life is a "you're welcome."
I never really liked pancakes until I started making them. My father, bless his heart, has never figured out gluten. His pancakes are like rubber.
MY pancakes are fluffy and delicious.
@Admiral
See I'm okay with everyone in, like, admiralty law faking it. Because boats are far away and I do not have to worry so much about them. I am concerned about things like prisons and electrical engineers and architects and airplane pilots faking it, because those things are all very close by and I have to worry about them. Excepr for airplanes, which are far away but can become very close by and a very significant priority in a very short matter of time.
@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Wait, is that actually a stereotype? God, I've lived a sheltered life.
It was almost inescapable ten to twenty years ago. I haven't seen it as much recently, but I'm also white, so...
ETA: Dave Chappelle did a bit on the stereotype in particular. Slurs, obviously.
