@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
@Prototart said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
there’s also just that white people “dreads” are so universally gross
Dreads and braids aren't the same thing, mind.
...until you sleep on the latter long enough without washing your hair. College roommates can be special. 
It was less a dreadlock and more a dreadlump.
there's still, like, five or six books worth of material to cover
...how is his name not Job already, seriously. I picture that series ending with an angry scrap of man-shaped leather shaking a defiant fist at the sky, standing in triumph on the parapet of his original land before Zeus' eagle zooms down to beak at his liver and chat about scheduling a recurring appointment.
Every time I see the hair debate come up, I am so grateful for my best friend in early high school (until she moved 
). We were 14 and it was the 80s and every hair style sucked for everyone which made it super easy to just laugh about together and grouse about our respective hair struggles. I mean, standing in front of the same mirror with so many hair products and devices between us they covered the entire counter and filled the sink, not talking about it would have been so much weirder.
I'm stupidly grateful to have had experiences like that, even back in the 80s stone ages. It's depressing to realize that there's much less of that since, at least in most of the US, because there's so much more social segregation since in some ways, and they're ways that often pretty dramatically reduce the chance for open conversation. 
@Wretched I will just note for the record that sorting-focused OCD and ADD?
Yes, it's a super special breed of hell.
@Coin The easiest example of this, to me, to someone who doesn't get that? Cintia Dicker. We've all seen the PB around, everywhere.
People generally don't guess 'Brazilian'.
ETA: most painfully relevant GAP tagline ever for this convo.
@Groth I hold myself up as evidence this isn't true. No, I'm not going to prove it, but I can assure you that years and years of dance lessons most certainly did.
@Goblin That's a lot like 'redneck' jokes in the US, at a glance. Which are also gross.
@Wretched Duh. That's when you get three or four things you give at least a marginal fuck about on the desk in front of you and flailingly flip amongst them until something sticks or you throw all of them on the 'fuck it' pile.
(aka 'give it a few extra rounds of twenty minutes'.)
I am not a syrup fan, either, but waffles as the bread of a sandwich/wrap of a taco sounds pretty frickin' amazing.
It has been a brutal week, and it has been difficult to get through it.
I remind myself it's not over yet, and there's still a few days left to go.
I remind myself that everyone's weeks are somewhere on the continuum of 'sorta crap <-> completely devastating', and further remind myself that even when everything's pretty rosy out there, it's more likely that people will make cracks about how I should kill myself than anything else if I reach out to anyone.
And then I'll wonder if I should, because the point of being anywhere at all for any reason remains absent.
Now I'll shut up, because this is just like any other week, now that I think about it.
@Ganymede I feel this. The husband was genuinely stunned over the past few months at home re: just how much meat I have to eat to not be constantly asleep and sick as a dog.
To him, 'food with meat' is 'here is a casserole that has a small amount of meat in it'. I mean, technically, that is food with meat.
It is not what works to deal with the 'I NEED MEAT NOW.' He doesn't quite grasp that that's fine for filler or a baseline, but it doesn't deal with the 'my body needs meat now or I'm going to zombify' whatsoever.
"But you had casserole that has some meat in it yesterday?" <-- does not mean I can just skip the meat foods for the next three days.
@ZombieGenesis Servant wigged me out because the weird group mentioned later in the series would be in my RL neck of the woods, which never comes up in anything, ever. There are areas of the state it would have been fairly plausible... but the one they picked? Not so much. Big ol' farmbarns? Kinnnnnnnnnnda thin on the ground hereabouts.
...except it comes up all the time in Supernatural. For some reason, Delaware comes up in Supernatural like, really weirdly a whole fuck of a lot. (Do y'all know how weird it is doing the yearly art show and being like 'this is pretty much the exact street the devil supposedly appeared on earth in that show' every year? Because it's fucking weird. It's fucking weird and there's no way to not think it every single time I go for a smoke break.)
@Derp said:
There absolutely should be some clout for those that came in the door first. They've already been on grid, they've helped to shape things around them, etc. I'm against people who 'just came in the door' having the same amount of influence as someone who's been there consistently for a year. I think that's pretty fair, too.
I do and don't agree with this on one salient point: it depends what they did with that year. If they sat on their ass and did absolutely nothing, "I got here first!" should not count for jack nor shit. And plenty of people do precisely this, making a login on a game early to ensure they'll always be among the most powerful. It's... pretty crappy, really. Active newcomers should absolutely be able to match, if not overcome, the power level of someone who has done nothing but waste the time they have had.
@HelloProject Two points of awesome: not only are you there, you're right next to another dear friend of mine. 
Congrats!
@Arkandel said:
Yeah, I agree with @surreality that 'activity' measured in some way or other ought to be a major factor of XP distribution. Otherwise it's less useful as a carrot, since it promotes nothing but existence.
Recently, when we had been looking at some changes to XP policies at Reno, I did some lengthy breakdowns of how their system was functioning in actuality, since the XP transfer mechanic was being reconsidered.
The breakdown between 'XP earned by simply existing' vs. 'XP earned through all other sources' (this included CG xp, incentives, beats, conditions, breaking points, aspirations, and the rare MUX-wide XP gifts there) were incredibly eye opening. If I had the time to write out all the findings at the moment, I would, but they put things into a much clearer perspective for me in regard to some of the 'fairness' arguments that swing in one direction or the other.
Quick summary: among the characters who had been on the game for equal amounts of time, most of them with very high XP totals, a character that never filed for beats or plot XP or anything of the kind was 10% 'other' and 90% 'time existing'. You'd think a very active player, who frequently filed jobs -- usually more than one a week -- for running plots and fulfilling aspirations and working conditions through and facing breaking points -- would be dramatically different. Not really. That character was approximately 22.5% 'other' and 77.5% 'time existing'.
Those numbers proved out more or less all the way down the chain. The most active character the game has ever seen, with a player who had been, for well over a month or two, running one or more plot scene for others almost daily, still did not come close to hitting a 50/50 parity between the two, with 'time existing' still taking the lead over all of the player's actual effort and investment of time and energy into the game.
That basically shot the 'it's not faaaaaaaaaaaaair that people who can be more active get to earn XP for it!' attitude I have seen straight to hell with no coming back from it.
@SuperiorHuron I am pretty sure Pinterest is the ADD trap of doom. Someone is sucking our hours away through the website in a cunning plan of some sort.
My mother asks me all the time, "Did you get that thing I sent on pinterest?" and I have to tell her, "Uhm, I don't have 6 hours to get lost today, so not yet, I dare not look," and she knows I'm neither kidding nor exaggerating in the smallest way.
Talk about looking into the abyss and it looking back into you. Though if I can ever build a lottery dream house, I am officially stealing the 'I blame this all on pinterest' image macro for a little bronze plaque in the garden somewhere.
In all seriousness if I see one more TV ad for bras about how I need to shop somewhere that stops at DDD, I might stab somebody.
Like... though it's next year instead of this year now, I likely have to have a reduction I really still don't want due to something I want to deal with even less. They only remove X amount when doing so, unless they're doing a full mastectomy, and, uh. I would be lucky to get down to a DDD if they remove the max.
Since I was mentioned, iirc HP understood it was bs behavior on the caller-out's part when the situation was described? I am barely peeking in at the moment because dental ow ow ow and a sudden depressive spiral, though, so... I really don't want to dig for it. It's somewhere... <hand flappies> ...back there in the thread. I might be misremembering, but the bits of my brain that are currently functioning lean 70% in that direction, anyway.
@Kestrel Having read... virtual hugs sent by the bucketful. Fingers crossed for you.