Hi.
I haven't been around for a while. And after this post I will likely immediately go back to being not-around. But someone mentioned elsewhere that Discord handles were being thrown around, so...
Packetdancer#4441 is me, in the off-chance anyone was looking for me in the past geological era. Or whatever it's been.
That's all, I guess?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Bye again.
@macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
And then there's the snob in me, that will be like... "No punctuation? Are you ill?"
Truthfully, if I'm not using punctuation, yes, I either am ill or borderline seriously depressed. If I cannot muster a "Hi!" instead of a "hi" something is wrong to a dire degree.
...which means I freak out when other people are just being lazy or on a phone where they don't want to bother with capitalization or punctuation.
@roz said in Dead Celebrities 2021 Edition:
Mira Furlan from Babylon 5
I hope as she goes to the sea and passes beyond the Rim, she has a chance to say hello to Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas.
Sleep in light, Ambassador Delenn.
@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
I have bounced from job to job to job to decades because the repetition KILLS ME. I get so bored doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I'm afraid, because my current job is nothing but repetition, and I've just passed the one year mark, and I'm feeling antsy. Its a great company, I could get really far... except I don't know if I'll last long enough to get there.
Belatedly...
This is, I think, the entire reason I love my current job. All my previous job hops were trying to do something new; from data modeling to video game development to cryptography to working at a microchip company to telecommunications to... etc.
But it turns out that being part of what basically boils down to the engineering equivalent of a mercenary company is amazing for ADHD; people run into difficult tech situations their own company can't solve, and come to us to make a working Thing X for them. So I could spend six months working on a video game console, then another eight on a medical device, then six on a satellite, then another six on an industrial sensor array...
I can stay in the same place, at the same company, with the same people, and still be functionally hopping from one thing to a different new one!
@ZombieGenesis said in Dead Celebrities 2020:
One of the best parts of Game of Thrones.
And the Avengers.
(No, not that Avengers, the other one.)
@Kanye-Qwest said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
sensory sensitivity is an ADHD thing, yes. I cut tags out of clothes, and I can't wear any tshirt or anything that puts even the slightest bit of pressure around my neck. Above my collarbone, really. I feel like it's choking me. Also, I chew my lips constantly. Which I never thought of as a symptom, before. OH BOY.
Okay, people need to stop making me have "wait, that's another ADHD thing?" moments, 'cause I gotta get actual work done today.
(I always assumed the 'gah, this collar is above the collarbones so I feel like I'm being strangled' thing was just another Random Rachel Quirk.)
I have a partially-done drop-in (well, drop-in provided you have the other Pax<whatever> libraries on which it depends) Ares-style scene system for Evennia that I started writing, uh... like last fall. I just have had no time/energy to really work on it lately.
I probably should finish it...
@Auspice - A Polish artist by the name of Aleksandra Wojcik. Her Artstation page is at https://intq.artstation.com/ — I saw her post that she was open for commissions on /r/HungryArtists over on Reddit, and commissioned her.
I highly recommend HungryArtists if you're looking to commission art.
When you have a character you've invested time and energy in, and then you get some awesome artwork of it, that can feel great. It's true on MU*s, and it's true on MMOs, and I'm very happy with this artwork I got of my FFXIV alter-ego.
(Put under spoilers to avoid smacking people with big artwork.)
***=Aaaaart***
I... uh. Just assumed most people didn't like layered fabrics, other than maybe sufficiently loose sweatshirt/hoodie/jacket over a t-shirt type thing.
Is that... not a thing for most people? *insert nervously grimacing blob emoji here*
@faraday said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
I have twice now -- twice -- gone on the first leg of a trip with a pocket knife
I stopped carrying my little leatherman tool (with a completely-incidental-to-why-I-liked-it pocket knife) in my purse after the 9/11 security stuff because I just KNEW that I would forget about it and accidentally walk through security somewhere with it.
Very, very belatedly...
I've got a much-loved pocketknife/multitool which lives in the messenger bag I take to work. I have carried it onto a plane for work trips more times than I can count. Many times no one finds it or comments on it (yay, security theater), but I have had to mail it home from the airport on five occasions.
@Auspice said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
I have chewing tendencies. I know this is an autism spectrum / ADHD thing.
Wait. You're telling me my habit of chewing on my own lip if I don't have something to chew on is part of my ADHD?
The fuck.
Adult diagnosis of ADHD continues to be an adventure in "Oh, that's not just me being weird?"
So, speaking of animated kids' shows...
There's a set of graphic novels by Mike Maihack which I have adored for years (since back in its webcomic days), called Cleopatra in Space. The comic is six volumes long; five of them are already published, with the sixth and final volume coming out next month. It's a mostly lighthearted adventure comic, albeit with some darker moments to it.
The basic premise is that Cleopatra, in her teenage years, discovers a mysterious tablet and gets thrown 30,000 years into the future, where the Nile Galaxy is threatened by an alien overlord named Octavian. There's a prophecy that only Cleopatra—someone presumably dead for, y'know, literally tens of thousands of years—can save them, one which has been largely discounted by almost everyone, right up until a very, very confused teenage Cleopatra falls through this inexplicable time rift...
But hey, no pressure, right?
Anyway, I had somehow overlooked the fact that it has been turned into an animated series by Dreamworks. The first season—which I guess is roughly an adaptation of Target Practice, the first graphic novel—aired in Southeast Asia last year, I guess but now it's out here! They've changed some things; Cleo's friends Akila and Brian (both human in the comic) have been turned into an alien and a cyborg, for instance.
Despite that, from what I've seen so far, it seems to stay pretty true to the spirit of the comic. (Not surprising, since apparently Maihack is the show-runner.) So I'm looking forward to watching this.
(Also, the opening theme is oddly catchy.)
FWIW, if you enjoy Ensign Sue Must Die, it's actually the first part of a trilogy:
Sadly, the Interrobang Studios site and store seem to be gone, so the print copies I have here are probably no longer obtainable, but I think the whole thing (including the second and third arcs) is still somewhere on Kevin Bolk's DeviantArt page. (Bolk being the co-creator and artist.)
@Rinel — For what it's worth, that's apparently a very common experience among trans women who have ADHD.
@RightMeow said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
I am sorry. I don't mean to be fangirling, but literally no one I have ever met has had this issue. Or they don't understand how I forget to eat. Or how I lose all track of time. Or that I have no concept of time. I have never had someone go 'me too' and I'm ... don't laugh.. I mean I suppose you can. But I'm a little like teary eyed because OMG.. finally someone else gets it and it's not just be being a weird time freak.
For what it's worth, an adult ADHD diagnosis has—at least for me—been an adventure in "Wait, that's an ADHD thing and not just a me thing?" for so many things like that, along with finally actually mentioning them and other ADHD folks being like "OH MY GOD I GET THAT." And both are accompanied by a feeling of some relief that it isn't just me.
So I 100% understand what you mean.
@Rinel said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
So, ADHD drugs. What they do is to get the dopamine factories running smoothly. You get the same hits as everyone else. No more shortages. No more explosions. Just a steady flow like it's supposed to be.
How they do that is completely outside of my ability to explain, but generally it involves overclocking the factories a bit (this is why benzodiazepines are really bad for ADHD; they slow down the already malfunctioning dopamine creators). There are non-stimulant medicines on the market, but they're newer and less numerous.
It's also why a lot of ADHD meds are really really bad for neurotypical folks, because it can screw up their dopamine production like whoa.
(Meanwhile, an artist whose Patreon I'm part of and who does comics about ADHD posted an early glimpse today at something to use to explain Rejection Sensitivity to folks, and man does it hit home.)
@Jennkryst said in General Video Game Thread:
Elite Dangerous is adding Space Legs. Whoop whoop!
I'm looking forward to booting it back up and trying that out once Odyssey hits!
Meanwhile, I loaded Star Citizen up for the first time in forever a little while ago and holy flipping cheese.
Logged into a city (New Babbage) on one of the corporate-owned planets (Microtech) in the Stanton system. Got up, went downstairs, took a maglev train over to a shopping mall area, bought some new clothes (and a chicken burger!), took the train back to the residential area, got one of my vehicles out of storage in a garage, drove around in the snow outside, drove out of the city and off into a forest, wandered around, drove back when the weather got shit, went back inside, took a train to the spaceport, got one of my ships out of storage, got takeoff clearance, flew across the system to another planet (ArcCorp), got landing clearance, hopped out, got transport over to Bevic Convention Center to check out the displays for the in-game "Invictus Week" stuff, went to the shopping area, bought different clothes (FASHION IS THE TRUE ENDGAME IN EVERYTHING), went back to hop on my ship, was planning to fly off to somewhere else for more clothes shopping when I got poked on Discord with "Hey, we need a healer, the one who was going to go run this with us can't make it, can you come help?" and logged off of Star Citizen to go play FFXIV instead.
It's interesting, really. Elite and Star Citizen are trying for very much the same sort of full living universe, but have taken very different approaches to it.
Elite went for a deep but narrow cut of their system; they picked a very small number of things and built those systems, then built a whoooole bunch of content for those systems. It let them release something functional very early on, but it's also meant that sometimes as they add new stuff—like when they added planetary landing and whatnot—they have to backtrack and rip out things (hence why getting out of ships has taken them so long, among other things). But it means what they have live at any given moment is a fully functional game.
Star Citizen, in contrast, is building out a broad but shallow version; they're building every system in the game (landing, ship maintenance and customization, mercantile, cargo, cities, enivronmental biomes, procedural content, ship-to-ship combat, FPS combat in an environment with gravity, FPS combat in zero-G), but then only making one or two bits of content with the systems to tune them and make certain that everything interconnects and works together well, building out one solar system to make sure all the pieces work on a wider scale, and then expanding out into the rest of the universe. It meant any one system you could play with was pretty cool, but the whole thing felt more like a very large engine tech demo than anything else.
So Elite always felt to me like we could do things, but there wasn't a lot of detail to anything and they were all sort of siloed systems. You had a universe to fly around and explore and mine and trade in, but it felt narrow. Everything you could land on that wasn't a space station was a rocky surface, every space station you landed on was just a menu you interacted with from in your cockpit, etc. Star Citizen, in contrast, always felt to me like they had a lot of detail—look, I can walk around inside my ship! I can see how systems will be damaged, and how I'd need to put down and repair them in a dire situation, if dire situations could arise!—but not much to do, because every system was getting just enough content to test the system and show it worked; like I said, a tech demo more than anything else.
And now Elite's starting to add some of the missing major systems/features into the established game, while Star Citizen's adding all kinds of content into the systems they've spent all this time building and interconnecting with planets and missions and storylines and whatnot, and I'm actually really eager to see where they both go. Right now SC still feels like a tech demo in alpha 3.9, admittedly, but it's starting to really feel like a tech demo of a game instead of an engine.
It feels like we're on the cusp of a very good time to be an internet spaceship enthusiast.
@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Tinuviel I think you're conflating a few things. One, having a fantasy setting decide to basically forego racism as part of the theme doesn't mean that all the players and the OOC experience will suddenly be free of bias, because OOCly we're all still brought up in this system.
Second, I think you're conflating "this experience was valuable for my personal learning and I think others could find it valuable, too" with "all games must provide this specific experience in the same way."
No, actually. Not even remotely, on either of these points.
I am speaking, specifically, about the idea that was raised that playing a POC character to tell and experience stories from the viewpoint of a POC, specifically to try to understand their point of view in reality.
@Sparks said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
Granted, that pressure is more common in anything set in the modern-day world, as opposed to fantasy worlds, but I'd argue that the modern-day world is where being willing to expand your viewpoint is actually potentially important to things outside of pretendy fun-times internet story games. Since we aren't experiencing widespread and systemic real-world racial oppression of elves, or werewolves, or Togruta, or anything else mythical or purely fictional.
Sorry, I'm evidently not being clear here, for which I apologize. Learning to expand a viewpoint does not mean taking another experience as your own. It means learning to see things from another person's point of view, which is something we have a general lack of in today's world.
I should clarify that I know some folks think of characters on a MU* as alter-egos, and use them to explore aspects of themselves. (Which can be really valuable for folks who are exploring their sexuality or gender identity and cannot do so safely in their offline home life.) I do not. As someone who writes a lot, I think of characters on a MU* as being like characters in a story I'm writing; their experiences are not mine, but if I'm writing a character in a story it behooves me to try to get out of my own head a little bit. After all, if I don't, a character will just be... well, me.
Trying to force yourself out of your own headspace to try to see something from some other point-of-view is something you can do in a lot of places—writing, certainly, but also friendly debate where you genuinely try to see the other person's viewpoint, reading nonfiction from people whose experiences differ from your own and really trying to understand where they're coming from, etc.
And when the viewpoints you're trying to stretch your head to are for something that's a real-world thing, it's worth doing in an informed manner; talk to people whose viewpoint you're at least trying to understand. And not just one, but as many as you can, since no one social group or cultural group or any group is likely to have uniform opinions on everything.
It's something people will never be perfect at—or even close—because we're all inherently flawed because you can never entirely get out of your own head. But I tend to think any time you can work to see a situation or scenario from a viewpoint that isn't your own inherent one, it's like exercising an empathy muscle. A man trying to genuinely try to comprehend what a woman goes through in a world full of sexist background radiation, someone from a more privileged social standing working to understand what folks who don't have money go through, someone trying to understand where people on the opposite side of a political divide are coming from (I... I have tried, but I cannot do this one, not even to try to win them over with rational arguments), etc.
You'll never 100% understand someone else's experience—hell, you might never understand 40% of it, if even that—but at least trying to step outside your own head long enough to see the general shape of where they're coming from is worth it. And their time and energy is worth you trying to at least meet them halfway rather than making them walk everything over to your point-of-view to explain whatever on your terms rather than you trying to understand what they're saying on theirs.
It ain't perfect, sometimes we'll get it wrong—heck, maybe a lot of times—but I honestly believe that empathy muscle is at least worth trying to exercise. And if you fail, you apologize, make amends as best you can, try to learn what you can do better next time, and then do better next time.
But there's a fear that in trying to stretch that muscle and get outside your own head that way, those failures might be Really Bad, and that so it's not worth trying to step outside your own head at all. And I just... I can't agree. None of us want to fail at things, but failures are also the first steps towards eventual success. And if you don't risk failure by trying, you never get anywhere at all.
Anyway, being forced into personal experiences outside your normal world view can certainly be one way to stretch that muscle. It's not ideal—and often not pleasant—but boy can it be effective. My friend quite demonstrably wanted me to change out my avatar to understand his online experience firsthand, because I was being unfairly dismissive about the severity of his experience when I kept equating it to the online sexist toxicity I was dealing with in the same game at the same time.
(I mean, the sexist toxicity was pretty awful too, but it did not involve freaking death threats. Most of the time. This having been pre-GamerGate.)
Honestly, my friend's challenge to me was like the more recent two folks who handled support for a company—one man and one woman—where they flipped email signatures for a week on the shared support account email and changed nothing else about how they handled the incoming client mails, and he had an eye-opening week when it came to the sort of sexist nonsense she put up with that he'd been blind to. It wasn't that he wasn't unsympathetic or unaware that sexism happened, he just had not truly comprehended how overwhelming and constant it was and how his productivity bottomed out when people thought they were talking to 'her'. And conversely, when people thought they were talking to 'him', she had her most productive week ever by leaps and bounds. Because, as her co-worker put it after the fact, it turned out he wasn't actually a lot faster like he'd thought (and written off as having had years more experience), but that in the time he could finish a ticket and move on to the next, she was stuck still trying to convince the client for her first ticket that she actually knew what she was talking about so they'd follow her instructions.
She could've told him all that. (In fact, she did tell him all that; the two of them wrote up Medium stories about the experience which are both worth reading.) And it wasn't like he didn't believe her that sexism was a factor, but he didn't actually understand it until she forced him into the situation she was normally in. It forced him to flex that empathy muscle, and get a little better at stepping outside his head to understand where she was coming from for other things too.
In the case of the challenge my friend made, he demanded I do it because he figured—rightly, as it turned out—the experience would be eye-opening. It was also a passive experience, just like the email, inasmuch as all I had to do was make a new character for the game who was dark-skinned instead of fair-skinned—akin to flipping the email signatures—and without saying or doing anything new or differently than I had been before, holy flipping cheese did the hidden assholes reveal themselves.
Anyway. I guess I'm not trying to say people must exercise that empathy muscle, or must do any one thing to try to get better at shifting their viewpoint to understand what someone else is trying to communicate; I think that'd counterproductive in the extreme. I guess I'm just saying... there's value in doing it when there are good opportunities, and I think discouraging it is detrimental.
And even if it's not the intention, a lot of the caution folks end up feeling they have to exercise—never write an NPC on a modern game that doesn't share their own background in case they get it wrong, never write a character in a story that isn't one entirely drawn from personal experience, never try to make the effort to stretch and see someone else's viewpoint because your interpretation might be wrong, keep arms and legs in preexisting unconscious cultural bias zone at all times while life is in motion due to risk of offense—is worse than the possibility of a failure you can learn from and do better as a result of.
That said, I'm realizing that I'm definitely not communicating any of this stuff very well (...and also, just now, that my ADHD meds wore off two hours ago and HELLO HYPERFOCUS ON WRITING A POST), and I've got no desire to muddy the waters of the thread more than I already have. So with this as my final attempt, I think I'll bow out as a contributor. (I'll definitely keep watching/listening, though, because there's a huge variety of viewpoints on all of this and it's worth listening to them.)
@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Sunny said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
The more... verbose people in this thread seem to want a place to actually explore the reality of being a POC.
I haven't gotten that impression, but if it's true, that strikes me as exactly opposite of something that would make RL POC comfortable/feel included.
I haven't gotten that impression, either. I've seen @Sparks be verbose on this, but my takeaway from her stuff was "It was really valuable to my perspective to branch out in making my characters on MMO dark-skinned," not "I want to play stories in game about the effects of racism, not stories where race isn't an issue." (For one thing, I know that she enjoys Arx's setting. Enough to staff there!)
Yeah, to demonstrate more clearly, what happened with that challenge was basically this. Albeit paraphrasing because fourteen years ago or whatever, so hell if I remember exact quotes, and the paraphrase is funny. (And putting it in spoilers because psuedo-script-formatting gets long.)
***=So much text***
(I am also suddenly fiercely missing online gaming with this friend since he moved across the country and we gradually lost touch several years ago. I'm a little tempted to reach out and see if he's currently playing anything actively.)
@Wizz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
It also ties into a fantasy trope that has ALWAYS bothered me, that fantasy cultures are usually super-simplified in much the same way -- ie, dwarves are all miners and heavy alcoholics , elves are almost always archers and scouts and live in forest communes, etc. It's become shorthand because it's recognizable and writers are desperate for shortcuts sometimes, but isn't that problematic for most of the same reasons it's problematic in real life?
I feel like genre fiction often seems to use race (in a "species" sense, like elves/dwarves/whatever, or alien races) as a shorthand for cultural background, and it annoys me greatly from a number of narrative and worldbuilding standpoints. Doubly so since the 'cultures' are often way more homogeneous than real cultures are. And I sometimes can't help but wonder if that also sets a precedent in pop culture that "all X (who are Something Different) are Y" that unconsciously reinforces real-world prejudices for some people, by giving them a world where absolutes can demonstrably be true (and the places where it isn't are the one dwarf who's written to be 'different' or whatever, i.e. the exception that proves the rule). Which is something that's never the case in the real world.
Then again, human brains are often weird and wildly divergent; something that one person views as harmless can reinforce another person's toxic views, because two human brains can take the same pattern and set of facts and draw two wildly different conclusions from it. When it's about objective things it's easy to say one person's wrong, but when it's subjective—especially about someone's personal emotional response to a thing—you can't really say that either is wrong, because neither's an invalid way to feel.
Which unfortunately means all of this—all of it—is really complicated, and no one is going to ever completely solve this sort of stuff because everyone views things differently, and something one affected person thinks is a good step forward and wholeheartedly encourages might have another person of near-identical background feeling offended.
I personally figure "being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes and see things from a different viewpoint" is not just a useful skill in writing various characters in a book, novel, or in an online game, but more importantly also sort of key to actual honest-to-god empathy for our fellow human beings, even when our situations differ. And empathy—real empathy—is something which my Quaker upbringing leaves me firmly convinced is something we seriously need more of, especially in today's world.
But all we can do is try to be better as we go forward day-by-day, and recognize that absolutely no approach—to any part of these sort of challenges—will please everyone. Not even everyone of the same culture and background.
