Best posts made by Vorpal

Oh, it is a compliment. The place has sparked my interest since the Spring, things just haven't worked out for me to check it out... but I think I will drop by fairly soon.

@silentsophia said:

Yarn.

Playing with yarn!

Sorry, I had to do it.

And, every once in a while, remember to ask yourself: "How would William Shatner act this out?"

Then do the thing that is its diametrical opposite.

Of all the things for sale there, I suggest you avoid Cosmonautica. It's a cool concept, but the game is essentially abandoned at this point in favor of their next game, the game feels unfinished and support is rather bad.

...well, damn. That's sad. Not unexpected, I mean, she was 89, but still...

@Coin said in Doctor Strange:

@Vorpal said in Doctor Strange:

I've always thought that was the consistent take on the Doctor- he takes care of the mystical intrusions… Elder Gods, monstrosities from beyond the edge of reality, that Doomsday Spell that a crazy cult in Kansas is trying to cast. He takes care of the issues that could end reality as we know it and leaves the non-mystical threats to the kids in spandex… unless he has no choice. And that’s the potential hook to integrate him, I think.

Precisely. fucking Thanos wielding the Infinity Gauntlet seems like the sort of thing Doctor Strange would be like, "oh, well, I should probably show up for that one, huh?"

Pretty much. After all, you can't be Earth's first line of defense against mystical intrusions if there's no Earth left

On the other hand, let us consider what a powerful bonding experience you would be missing. Colorful uncle anecdotes are always high in demand as icebreakers!

English isn't my first language, either, but I think I manage just fine- outside of the odd Vorpal Effect moment.

@Arkandel said:

... Only in Russia. 16-year old wins night with porn star, his mom won't let him go.

Mamma mia (Mamma mia) Mamma mia let me go-
Beelzebub has a porn star set aside for me...

@Three-Eyed-Crow Well, Justice League was Snyder's work, and you can tell because it looks dreary and dark.

I am actually optimistic. Once Justice League passes by, we may have a Rebirth-esque feel to the DC movies, very much like Wonder Woman.

Johns was added to Justice League and I hear the reshoots and re-writes are orchestrated by him, so here's hoping...

And they've already announced a sequel to Wonder Woman. As long as we keep getting Patty and Gal on board, I'm all the way in.

Geez, Chuma. You're only supposed to have a little Captain in you, not the entire goddamned Spanish Armada.

That time when you're stoked about performing your favorite Mozart opera-

And then the cocking stage director sends you his 'great concept' through email. And all excitement gets sucked out of the room as if a fucking Dementor had sashayed in.

Apparently the director felt that the 'Ending of the opera (the final sextet) didn't fit in with the dramatic concept of the show', so he cut it. Apparently he’s changing the opera so that at the scene where Don Giovanni is visited by the man he murdered, the scene is reset to the act I scene where he (offstage in Act I) tried to rape Donna Anna. And the great stage director will reveal that in the duel with Donna Anna’s father, it was actually Don Giovanni who got killed OoOoOoOooOOoo Shyamalan twist, THE WHOLE OPERA PLAYED OUT IN GIOVANNI’S MIND AS HE WAS DYING! He actually makes a mention of The Sixth Sense in the email- because we make things edgy by referencing a 17-year-old movie. Ooh! ooh! I have another way to make it edgy! Have Donna Elvira discover that THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

But the thing that takes the cake is this little paragraph of presumptuousness where he hopes to :
“explore the push and pull of the Freudian concept of Id, Ego, and Super Ego” and how the characters are all manifestations of the ID-impulse-lust, Superego-conscience and Ego-balance. With the ending showing that, when the Commendatore takes Don Giovanni’s hand, the Don will open his shirt to reveal it soaked in his own blood and he will begin to realize he was the one killed and his life will finally unravel.

The conceit of it. "The ending the composer (Mozart, no less) composed didn't fit in with my blatant self-aggrandizement to show off what a smart cookie I am, so I've taken it out and replaced it with outmoded Freudian psychoanalysis to add smugly to the heap, being completely oblivious that this specific kind of reinvention was cliché 50 years ago when I was a fetus in the womb."

This has gone from 'a job I was looking forward to' to 'a job to get through just to have the role in my resume in the hopes of a better production in the future.' Unfortunately it is the Age of the Stage Director. The music director has no weight in most companies to pull back the nutbuttery. Fuck these ‘High Concept’ stage directors- if they want to parade what pretentious pricks they are, they can write their own plays and operas that nobody will see instead of piggybacking on someone else’s masterpiece that will guarantee them a captive audience.

What sucks is that 90% of the companies out there do not disclose the details of a production unless they're renting a pre-made production. Many times, the 'Great Director' hasn't fully completed 'his/her vision' until after contracts have been signed, so most singers are signing up blind when the audition and they have to hope they get a stage director who is not awful.

@Kanye-Qwest I don't know about Derp's staffing, myself, but generally speaking, people aren't...

And then there's Brave New World. My god.

That being said, and getting back to the topic at hand- on the whole, staffers do deserve their fair share of gratitude. While I have been tempted to help out at a MU* here and there when they were understaffed, I know myself far too well. I have a very dramatic temperament (just ask @silentsophia ) and can be very cutting. I'm also not afraid of being confrontational when I smell BS as opposed to taking the more diplomatic approach. None of those things make for an ideal staffer- so I admire people who can take the position and be good at it.

@Jaded Hamlet 2: Ophelia Rises.
It could be like Night of the Living Dead, with codpieces.

@Misadventure eat crow and apologize like a grown-up It's why I try not to raise a stink unless evidence itself tells me that it's not just me. A few tiffs with a staffer or a player in particular might mean that our personalities are incompatible or that we get on each other's nerves. A fail-conga of that same staffer with a large number of players, on the other hand, means there's something rotten in Denmark...

@Thenomain As someone who is sympathetic to second wave feminism, I have to admit that the tactics, hostile language and argument framing that the third wave school has used has done a lot to damage the cause and alienate potential allies. There is a distinctly barbed and hostile attitude in the core movement (not to mention a lot of high-grade insanity coming from the likes of Luce Irigaray), and a lot of the arguments are focused on (if you're familiar with the Three Languages Of Politics) the Oppressor---Oppressed axis, and very focused on not how to resolve the oppression (which would require a shift in axis and a re-framing of a lot of theory) but rather how to shift who is being oppressed.

The addition of identity politics also seems to have created further division and self-cannibalism in the movement (as a brief example- at a conference on feminism and identity, infighting broke out between white women, women of color, gay women, bi women, and it got to the point that there was also a sub-set of women with allergies who complained they were not being represented nor being taken into account by the larger group.) There is a very strongly marked "us vs. them" mentality in the academic core of the third wave movement- in fact, a good amount of subtext in the academic literature itself seems to encourage that outlook, and that unfortunately means it is not going to solve any problems... precisely because of some of the things Thenomian pointed out. You can't break a boulder merely by shifting who has to carry it.

And the mirror image of the harcore Third Wave movement is, of course, the MRA groups. These devolve into sheer caricature because they are already a reactionary creation to a reactionary creation (hardcore Third Wave.) They're one iteration away from a Saturday Night Live skit. Yes, there are legitimate issues about the Third Wave movement that need to be criticized in an open and balanced discussion... and what the MRAs are doing is precisely not doing that. At the same time, there are legitimate issues that the Third Wave movement has identified, even if (to my judgement) the methods and arguments they have employed thus far are very problematic and flawed. That their methods may be severely flawed doesn't erase the validity of the complaints - but pointing out the flaws should also not be taken as an attempt to dismiss the complaints.

Except, of course, when you have the raging cocks who go "Women don't face sexual harassment! It's all lies."

At which point, yeah, kick them in the nuts hard, because they're being total assholes.

@Sammi said:

@Vorpal said:

For a while I was part of the classical music community and performed several live concerts, but I haven’t done that in a while. I still attend concerts by friends in both popular and classical music fields- one of the staple duos there being Jaycatt and Frogg, two old friends of mine.

I'm glad they're still doing stuff. I went to a few of their concerts many seasons ago, and I liked it.

They're very cool people, and very very sweet.

@deadculture said in RL Anger:

@Vorpal Interesting. Was that why Ecuador switched to the American dollar as their national currency? To make money laundering easier, anyhow. How come there hasn't been a government to at least clean things up? Is it a shameless, kleptocratic oligarchy as with the rest of the continent?

Not really- the switch to the dollar was organized by a rather unqualified president who thought it would solve inflation. But considering the government's level of corruption was a large driving force behind the inflationary problem... well. That didn't help one bit, as you can imagine.

As to why there hasn't been a government to clean things up? It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived in the country... but as a native who got the fuck out of there a few years ago, I can tell you this:

Ecuador is a corrupt culture. It suffers from severe soul-rot. The pervading cultural attitude is not "how can I make things better?' but rather "How can I take advantage of something?"

Let me give you an example. My father worked in the government for several years- he was one of the people who fought to bring updated hydroelectric energy to the country. After many years of that, he returned to the private sector to work. For many years the rumor that kept going around in my father’s circle of acquaintances was “Nicolas is very smart! He’s keeping all that money he stole while in his government position hidden. Very clever of him.”

Eventually, after a decade of that alleged money not surfacing and my father’s lifestyle not reflecting that of a millionaire’s, those acquaintances realized that my father had, in fact, not stolen any money while in the government.

The consensus? That my father was an idiot. For being honest.

This is not an anomaly. This is part and parcel of the Ecuadorean experience, where a phone company (state owned) employee will ask you for a bribe, while you are standing in line at the office, in front of everyone, so you can have a phone line assigned to you. The fact that my father refused to bribe anyone is the reason why we had to wait five years for us to get a new phone line.

Ecuador is a rapacious culture that constantly elects politicians who are more and more populist by the term, and there is no such thing as outrage on the cultural level. The pervasive attitude is “You can’t do anything to change anything, so you might as well take advantage of it.” It’s the kind of sense of life that allows corruption to breed like a fungus. Living there, being part of the culture, is like having an enormous lead weight of a sky baring down on you. It is living with people who see all of these things happen and not give one shit about it- because everything is “can’t do.”

The financial and political situation in Ecuador is a direct result of its culture and the values that culture promotes. There will never be a government that will attempt to ‘clean things up’ for as long as that attitude remains the pervasive Ecuadorean attitude.

That's why I got the fuck out of there faster than the speed of can't.

I'm on two consent-based MU*s, and I honestly would love to be on a system-based one. An original setting- or at least a non-DC/Marvel setting would be refreshing as well, populated entirely by OCs.

I know that Empire Bay tried to do this, but the fact that they only have one active staffer, the headwiz being around only on Saturdays or so, kind of kills the place for me. I @mailed the headwiz concerning an issue with the system (a missing extra I needed for proper statting) that I had +requested about four weeks ago... but was never contacted about it, nor was I ever @mailed nor the job was ever commented on. The headwiz never got back to me, even after I sent a second @mail to point out that the job was no longer listed, but there were no @mails nor contacts explaining -what- actually happened to it... and since he's the only one with the power to approve sheets...

Yeah, I stopped logging there after that, it kind of showed me what sort of wasteland I'd be investing my time in. So...

System-based OC superhero RP... with a staff that's actually responsive.

I should also note that Ecuador is now effectively as close to a totalitarian government as you can have without a full declaration. Journalists in Ecuador are warned on a daily basis about possible legal actions that may be taken against them. Newspapers are being forced to publish corrections, on the front page, with texts, headers and layouts sent directly from the Presidency’s Secretariat of Communication. The President has successfully sued a newspaper for slander, jailed its editor and imposed a multi-million dollar bail. Radio stations and newspapers are constantly being taken over by the government, and Our Dear Leader speaks to The People every Saturday through television, on a multi-hour televised block that takes up all channels.

Sometimes, as John Oliver showed, those blocks include the appearance of local clowns. Outside of the President, I mean.

The president who jailed a teenager for flipping him off.

As horrifying as this might make me seem, I regret that the son of a bitch was visiting Rome at the time the earthquake hit. This may make me seem calloused and inhuman in the face of such a tragedy, but that is not my intention. If there had to be a catastrophe, the least it could have done was take out the other catastrophe with it.

@Kanye-Qwest said in The Shame Game:

@Kestrel said in The Shame Game:

Striving to think rationally is admirable for all the reasons discussed above. And it is, on the whole, better than thinking emotionally

lol what
People who aren't caught up in bullshit are aware that both logic and emotion are pretty important in dealing with life. One without the other is bad, no matter which way you skew.

It's a variation of the Straw Vulcan, honestly. Emotions aren't bad. However, they aren't tools of congition, they are tools of reaction. Emotions only tell you how you feel about something, not necessarily that it is good or bad. That's where reason comes in- ideally, through introspection, you should take stock of your emotions and ask yourself "What am I feeling, and why?" Emotions are kind of the system warning flags that tells you something is going on- but ideally it's up to the actual diagnostic tool (your rational mind) to do the work of digging and trying to find whether it's really a good thing or a bad thing... or calling for help.

Sometimes your emotions are spot on and your rational side can corroborate that, such as "Whoa, that's right, that guy is a massive douche and he's taking advantage of me." Other times, depending on what you have internalized, your emotions are totally out of whack with reality, which is why that introspection is very, very important- because operating on subconsciously-assimilated bad premises can really fuck you up. Sometimes people stay in abusive or toxic relationships because of how they feel about themselves- even when everything in their rational minds tells them they should be booking it out of there, the adage of "follow your heart, not your mind" comes up time and time again.

Usually when your heart and your mind are in conflict, your mind's the one to trust- emotions are reactive, not cognitive. That being said, it's not easy, not by a long shot, and it requires a lot of honesty and it isn't infallible.

Still, it's a pretty good toolset. Emotions and Reason aren't opposites, they're meant to work together.