@Ganymede Oh, Tzimisce, you just keep making me happier all the time. 
I just remember those being called ghoul families or something else when they were originally introduced, but I haven't actually looked at oWoD since it's second edition -- I didn't even bother with revised it's been so long.
...but I really do miss me some Tzimisce. <pines>
@DnvnQuinn I think that's more the 2e version, and really not even then so much. From what I recall of the olden days, revenants were WW trying to do a spin on 'The Crow'. Or something about revenants was, back then.
I'm lucking out with the creepy sparkle white when it comes in.
I have no idea when it began coming in, since I've been dyeing my hair strange colors since I was 13.
Then, one sad day, after I had let the roots grow out a while, I looked... and thought I had glitter and dust in my hair there was so much light sparkly shit going on in there.
I was wrong...
...so very wrong...
With the exception of seeing old friends and a really great family trip to the Caribbean in January, 2016 is a fucking dismal shithole of a year.
2015 was that year for me. Business? Dead in someone else's bookkeeping error. (I avoided bankruptcy by, literally, under $100 come year's end. I consider this almost miraculous.) Ancient Cat? Cancer scare? (Thankfully no, but other issues.) Family with major health issues? Just... yeeeeeesh, it was one hell of a list, kicking off in May, and... I did make it past the anniversary of every possible thing goes straight to hell without the courtesy of a handbasket.
I am sorry you inherited the craptastic hell year. 
Nobody deserves that, ever.
@Arkandel I would have... completely lost it.
We lost Ancient Cat last year. She'd been with us about 20 years, which was about half my entire life at that point. We called her my 'overly familiar' for a reason, because she was up in my business quite literally every waking moment and more or less hated every other living being on the planet with the exception of two and regarded them with some epic haughty disdain. (Cats are already impressive in this regard, but damn did Ancient Cat work a fine withering stare.) Us, she adored, even if she sometimes made it seem like it was grudging, which... dammit, was just ultimately all the more endearing.
Not going to lie... this has been a hard year, but. The sad does fade a little, and the good memories really, really do stay.
@Vorpal Pretty much, yeah. A plausibility test seems like a universal thing, even if people are going to set that bar in different places.
Most of the folks who think, 'this might be possible, but I don't know' do stick with unexplained, on the whole. Which I have no issue with, and think is more clear. It covers, 'this includes stuff that we may not have explanations for yet, but we might find out it's something we already understand'. They're not people who are presupposing an answer in the 'it's aliens!' <cue wild hair guy> camp, but they're not in the 'I've already decided aliens are impossible so it can't possibly be aliens' camp. (As an example, you could swap in whatever thing someone is looking at at the time, really.)
@Vorpal The edit prolly helps clarify the issue I'm having here; it may have gone in while you were typing, though.
You can probably see from that where I'm having an issue with this approach.
The problem is, plausible is a moving target.
I don't have an issue with things passing a plausibility test on a personal level -- hell, I think they should.
I do think any given thing stands or fails on its own merits or failings, however. Just because we put them under the same heading doesn't mean X impacts Y unless something more than the word used to describe them is the same.
@Vorpal said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
@Vorpal I took precisely as much as I needed to to confirm the definition disagrees with itself, and is not, in fact, an excuse to say, "Since this word can apply to any of these things, any of these things can be used to disprove any other."
Which is what you keep doing.
You want to disprove Nessie? Disprove Nessie. But don't use table-tipping and faith healers to do it simply because people call both things 'supernatural' and think that's kosher reasoning.
Actually, it's not a matter of disproving, it's a matter of proving. If you have a supernatural claim, the onus of proof is on you.
Which is a perspective I've already stated: fine by me.
You're also claiming, below that, apparently, that if you believe one thing even can be possible, you must believe all the rest are inherently true.
That is simply and transparently absurd.
Edit: You've been consistently making the case that to believe something might potentially exist, someone must be able to prove it already exists. You don't see the logic failure there? I mean, really?
@Vorpal I took precisely as much as I needed to to confirm the definition disagrees with itself, and is not, in fact, an excuse to say, "Since this word can apply to any of these things, any of these things can be used to disprove any other."
Which is what you keep doing.
You want to disprove Nessie? Disprove Nessie. But don't use table-tipping and faith healers to do it simply because people call both things 'supernatural' and think that's kosher reasoning.
@Vorpal That quote is in the linked definition. It's not something I yanked out of my ass.
You're the one who is insisting on linguistic specificity.
Are you wondering why I'd take the dictionary as an authority over your personal interpretation and definition in this conversation? Dude...
@Vorpal Dude, you're the one demanding specificity of terms.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supernatural
Note where it begins: "unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature".
We have not, actually, explained All The Things yet.
Including plenty of things that have nothing to do with gods and monsters and invisible pixies. We have more things thoroughly unrelated to pixies we haven't explained than we do things related to pixies.
That means 'the supernatural' exists per the most basic definition, unless you want to insist that science has an answer for everything, and we know factually it does not.
Note that it goes on to say it especially refers to those things. If we're going to get supremely pedantic here, especially and exclusively are not the same word and do not share a definition.
Then we've got: "departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature" which essentially means 'fuck that definition above right in the ear, things that just seem to be weird count, too'.
Which is further demonstration why this word is useless, and how the conflations occur that render discussion around this term a hopeless morass of bullshit and semantics.
Would we be arguing if the word was 'unexplained'?
I don't think so. If there's one unifying universal point I'm reasonably sure everyone could agree on, it's: "Not everything is explained."
@Pyrephox said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
@surreality Here's the thing, though. I think you're right, "Believing isn't inherently bad", isn't possible to stand as true or false. However, it's also meaningless to any real conversation. It's the equivalent of "It's possible that mistakes were made." It makes no point, it stands on nothing - it can't be true or false because it has no real meaning. No matter how someone tries to engage with that statement, it's not going to be sufficient, because that statement is so broad and loose that no matter WHAT the reply is, someone can then say, "That's not what I meant!" So, yeah. Using that statement sets you up for frustration.
...and the same is true of the reverse argument, that 'believing is inherently bad'.
Which is the entire point I was making, as I was replying to someone stating this. That from either side, this statement is effectively useless.
I could read into 'funny how nobody called that statement out, but they do with the reverse, and on me for calling it out as being actually the same', but again, that's honestly more 'this is the stupid shit people should really brace themselves for when they even try to have such a discussion' re: frustration.
And yes, the reasons people think A, B, and C are or aren't happening are frequently different. As are people who believe A, think B is possible, and think C is total horsecrap. Which is why things like:
@Vorpal said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
Yes, ghosts and demons and such aren't real. They simply can't be, based on the rather sizable amount of what we know about our universe (magic doesn't work, outside of pelvic sorcery). That doesn't mean we never ask the question "Well, if they didn't see angels, then what made them 'see' angels?"
stand out. Because most of those things have nothing to do with any of those other things. Ghosts can't exist because magic doesn't work? OK, how are those things related in the first place, beyond, "they're both things people think of in this broadest of all possible categories?" And then we skip right along to angels. It is groanworthy.
@Pyrephox said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
Side note: There is really very little as amusing as going on a ghost hunt with two self-proclaimed "sensitives" who don't know each other. Turns out every single building we entered had multiple ghosts of horribly abused children, as the two of them wound each other up and tried to play "who's got the clearer picture of this sad spirit".
(Have seen this, can confirm, is genuinely funny as hell.)
@Pyrephox Re: ketchup on eggs, ugh, yes, agreed. 
I know many of the same kinds of folks, and my reactions to them vary from being chill with them to having the weirdest discussions ever that result in bizarre arguments... which should also surprise roughly no one without the need to be psychic. 
What's being missed here, though? I was addressing a specific post, and a specific point in it.
I even had to go back and do it again, I mean... yeesh, you wanna talk about frustrated? Try doing that twice and still seeing people conflate all manner of other things into the mix.
"believing isn't inherently bad" -- again, too many examples either way for this statement to really stand as inherently true or false. Some instances, true. Some instances, false.
You can't generalize the truth or falsehood of the statement, however, from one instance, save for in reference to that instance.
What I am seeing, repeatedly, is essentially a lot of, "Bigfoot isn't real because magic is can't be proven to exist." "Ghosts can't be real because some religions make people do dangerous things." "Religious people are cultists because there's no demonstrable evidence that people can move things with their minds under lab conditions."
These are statements that makes no sense whatsoever, and they are what comes from conflating as much as is being consistently conflated throughout the thread.
Yeah, that is eye-rollingly frustrating, it's typical of over-generalizing and conflating too many things, and just... arrrrgh.
@Pyrephox There's a difference here, too, though -- and there's this underlying assumption that anyone who is even willing to talk about shit is advocating that others must or should believe also.
And still a lot of 'I think this is possible' being taken to mean 'I believe this is totally true!' which are still not the same thing, goddamn, people. The more that goes on, the dumber everyone is getting, and that's just depressing.
I'm not so much seeing that from the 'I think this is possible' side of this discussion. (I am seeing a hell of a lot of it, with the typical condescension attached, otherwise. Predictable, don't even have to be a psychic on that one...)
@Pyrephox I'm not arguing that.
@Lotherio referenced a quote, suggesting 'believing in a thing harms no one'.
Well, that's not accurate. It absolutely can.
However. When you say, "that is untrue, believing in a thing is inherently bad, because of <this example>," you're just as factually inaccurate, because that example is not the only thing it can apply to.
It is something you simply cannot reasonably generalize about; there are far too many exceptions running contrary to either end of the spectrum of possibilities, and even more in the middle ground, because people lump so many things under this heading, from actual science they don't understand to mediums to world religions to ancient myths to medicine to casting spells.
Constantly in this thread, we've seen people talk about one thing, only to have completely irrelevant concepts to the specific thing they're discussing -- like 'magic' or 'pixies' or 'faith healers' or mercy-knows-what-else -- thrown in to claim the other unrelated thing is surely crap, so either there's some seriously intellectually disingenuous sleight of hand going on there, or people really do lump all of these subjects together. I'm not going to make a call on which is going on even if I lean toward the latter, but as far as observable phenomena go? Well, read the thread; it's all over the place.
And if we're being anal retentive about the specific definition and terminology of 'energy' and 'energy fields' and similar? Yeah, maybe we need to be specific in the same way across the board -- but that's consistently not happening here. (And it is pretty much bullshit.)
Thank you for this. 
I like to tinker with things and see what they do and how they work. I'll likely peek at this in the same way, and I appreciate the mac support and instructions.
(Anybody giving good mac support gets a major thumbs up from me. It's rare enough it deserves a specific mention and a sincere thank you.)
