Posts made by surreality

Things that help me:

• Have a stash of 'grazing food' in your most frequently occupied space. I may not be able to be assed to go to the kitchen and/or cook, even if it's just throwing something into the microwave. I keep a few snackables around the computer to avoid complete days of 'forget to eat' or 'I'll cook something in an hour, shut up growlygut' (that becomes forgetting again for 6 hours and shrugging and going to bed even more exhausted than I should be). I keep pretzels, a box of whatever horrible cereal I wasn't allowed to have as a kid, some hard candies (usually peppermints since they help with stress-based stomach woes), and similar small, no mess non-perishables. I keep mine by the computer, but I have kept stuff in the bedroom for times I can't make it down the hall. (In fairness, this is rare, because the studio/computer room is almost equally sedentary a space, and I have to haul my ass down the hall to the bathroom anyway, so may as well go the next few feet and throw something on Netflix to zone out to.)

• Don't shame yourself for not being up to <thing> right now. Easier said than done when it's 'eat' or 'shower' or 'sleep', but if you can't due to feeling awful and being overwhelmed with stress, burdening yourself even more is not going to help. Short form: it won't help to call yourself an asshole for these things when you already feel like shit.

@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.

@HelloProject Two points of awesome: not only are you there, you're right next to another dear friend of mine. Congrats!

ADD: it's like being a time lord without a Tardis, and you can't remember where the fuck you left that goddamned screwdriver.

I probably should relate some of the reasoning behind my 'if I think I could hurt someone, I will not do it' stance, because as I was thinking about it last night, I really couldn't think of much else.

The first two schools I attended through 6th grade -- and we're talking about the late 1970s here, into the early 80s at the tail end -- were not what I'd call bastions of tolerance or diversity. Both were Catholic schools. The first (1-4) was pretty much nightmare fuel; there was zero protection from (sometimes very violent) bullying, and they were so genuinely backward they tried to keep someone back a year 'because they were too short to move on to the next grade'. (Not me, but you can imagine why being a short kid in this place was, uh, not fun.)

So my first 'real world hero' -- not someone from a book or a movie or even documentary TV (I was a Cousteau nerd) -- was that student's mother, who came in to read the nuns the riot act about how completely absurd that was so loudly we could hear her all the way across the stone and brick building.

It had nothing to do with race, gender, or any of the 'big bigotries' we think of, but -- hell, maybe the ADD did the usual blender routine on it in my brain, maybe because it was a stupid 'otherism' that affected me as well so it was more personal than something completely abstract would have been -- it was a very early formative example. 'How tall my son is has nothing to do with the capacity of his brain or his ability to learn, and if you're too ignorant to understand that, maybe I should find someone smarter to teach him.' Go Mrs. McGonegal!

It was a low-to-mid middle class school. 5-6 were at an all girl's upper middle class+ school, and it was so much worse. Everyone in the first school save for one student was white; that improved slightly at the second, but to say the experience those students had there was worse would be a profound understatement. I was 'the poor kid' in that group, and the impact of that was similarly obvious. Catholic Mass and sacrament participation was mandatory. The Jewish girl didn't get a pass. The Hindu girls didn't. The latter had parents who had filed a court order to prevent them from being forced to participate and the school forced it anyway, and fellow students shit all over them along with the teachers.

Again, maybe I only saw it -- and other things I won't relate here because they're egregiously awful and I don't want to dump those into a post where they could trigger someone who has experienced similar -- because I was being shit on by the same people, albeit for a different completely stupid excuse to shit on someone.

But I couldn't not see it. I spent a lot of my childhood feeling batshit crazy because the people in authority -- who were supposed to be our role models and the authority figures we could turn to for help and advice and protection -- were behaving in what was so clearly a harmfully nonsensical way. It was not possible to not see that, either.

That's generally what I draw from, along with the observations I've made over the course of my life since then, when I do make an attempt.

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Until--I saw people like totally throwing themselves at him, and also being super hostile towards me because they were sure that I'd found it and was riding on it.

In my brain, were I playing that male character, if you found it, it likely would have been in a dusty old shoebox in the pantry, covered in cobwebs, and mistaken for a freeze-dried mole rat before the 'back away slowly and don't think about it ever again because suddenly there are just so many questions' became the better part of valor.

Because I'm just the super serious hotness like that.

(Rinel, if you put people off... ? Observe the above, which also... yeah, that stuff about 'sense of humor' a few days ago, yes, that. We can start a sisterhood or something.)

@Ganymede It's more the rest of me. In a power corset dress, I am round enough -- think larrrrrrge hourglass, I guess? I stole the term 'dayglass' from a beloved friend years ago and have stuck with it ever since -- that the proportions of 'incredibly short fat hourglass woman in a corset powerdress' would be very Ursula. Especially balanced on wee small feets.

I mean. She had style, so that's not totally a complaint, either, I suppose, but I would look completely hilarious and can admit this to myself quite comfortably.

Also, ohgods I had a point that prevented a nap and by the time I got to the screen I forgot what it was until now.

A good point of reference for anyone who doesn't understand the 'well-intentioned but is afraid to get things wrong in an offensive way'?

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.

Those of us who lived through that era of gaming, well. There is a hell of a cautionary tale right there.

@Derp If I was hot and thin enough to pull off that look without going all Ursula Under The Sea, I would. I so would. When I asked a professional corsetier once upon a slimmer time, I think the words he used were 'I would want to consult an engineer'.

This monitor is going to be so, so clean at this rate.

I blame a friend of mine from the con years who actually had a seriously kickass metal bra with cups in the shape of hands. Her cups also often runneth-ed over, so. Idea!

@Auspice I kept waiting to see someone some day on Shang be a human bra, holding up someone's giant boobs while trailing dutifully along behind them, but alas. I mean. You'd think somebody would be into that? Not me, as either end of that train, but. I would have hi-5'd them in spirit.

@Auspice Preach. I think we can all understand wanting to play something that is 'not us'. Just, we're never going to hurt someone's feelings going down a few cup sizes.

@Wretched said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@insomniac7809 But then how will people know my pc got these tiddies?

<calmly wipes down the monitor>

In all seriousness part of my escapist fantasy is playing women with smaller boobs than mine. Because a strapless dress is part of my fantasy dream world, goddammit.

I honestly care about this more than hair/skin/eye color or combination thereof by miles and miles and miles.

@Auspice Meanwhile, most of the people not doing it have had various stripes of 'I could hurt real people and I don't want to do that in everybody's funtimes' as a fair bit of the reasoning, which is very much not 'Aryan man of might is the superiorest dominant being of beauty and power and I shall either be him or worship at his mightiest of wangs'. (S'cuse me, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.)

Like, @Kestrel mentions one of these shitheels, and we've had some trolls with gross viewpoints crop up on the forum over the years, but they aren't in this thread. I doubt they'd care what anybody thought about the topic anyway.

@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.

^ This right here.

@egg I only play women because 1. I'm shit at playing men; 2. it's important to me to play female characters that include some of my experience of being a woman as reference. Therefore, to some extent, I am always going to be playing 'something like me'.

I have zero interest learning to play a dude better. Zero. So far as I know, that isn't some kind of RP sin.

@egg Uhm. What are you suggesting those of us who are white do, then, to represent ourselves, if 'representing yourself = white' is wrong and/or bad?

This is not a snarky question, it is legitimate confusion.

Maybe you don't intend to convey it being wrong and bad, but it's sounding that way, and the 'Aryan' mention is... uhm. Pretty sure there are not a lot of white supremacists engaging with this topic?

There are also a variety of things being discussed. One of those things is 'how to provide a safe and inclusive play space'. Removing sexism and racism from the game's theme are big here.

That's different from 'how to realistically portray a real world minority in a mostly-realistic modern game world without causing offense to players of that minority RL'.

I don't get the impression people are talking about exploring.

I know I'm not willing to 'challenge myself' as a writing or thought exercise when the cost of failure isn't egg on my face, it's a slap to someone else's.

@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Kanye-Qwest I kind of think of it, like -- sometimes I want to watch media of women kicking sexism's ass and taking names. Overcoming and being awesome. Sometimes I want to watch media where I just don't have to think about sexism at all and it's just people being people. They both have places for me, just depends on my mood.

^ All of this.

I am down with playing either. I just don't want to ever have to worry about it OOC on a game.

IC is a story. OOC? Kill it with fire.