Best posts made by WTFE

I can and will not speak for others. I can and will, however, speak for myself.

I don't believe that shaming changes anything essential in a person. Shamed people will not suddenly say "I was wrong all along; I will mend my ways". Belief in this is nonsense.

Yet…

There remains an effect that can lead to change, even in a person's essentials. See, many of our behaviours are ingrained habits which have internalized to the point of being identity. Shaming people's behaviours gets them to stop doing it (whether they agree with the change or not). If it gets them to stop doing it long enough, the habit is replaced by a new habit; presumably one that is less offensive to the people around them (however you define "around them").

Basically, if there's enough removed positive reinforcement in a person's social group, behaviours--and eventually attitudes--will change. The key word there is "enough". And it depends also on the perceived social group.

So the shame game here can have an effect. It's not guaranteed to, but it is an ingredient in effecting change. The fact that it is also fun for the people playing it is a bit of icing.

(This is over and above the other reasons cited above like documenting misbehaviour, providing an "audit trail" so to speak, providing a voice in a forum not controlled by game owners, etc. These, too, are an issue. I'm just specifically addressing the "shame" angle.)

@Lisse24 said in RL Anger:

@WTFE I'm so sorry that you had all of those experiences, and for the role that Christians played in them, I apologize to the extent that I'm able. My family and my church condemned such extremist and uncalled for measures in the 80's and I continue to do so now. I'm sorry you felt hated and judged and isolated, if I was present and could have stopped it, I like to believe that I would have. Please believe me, that I'm currently trying to do what I can to keep anyone from feeling that way in the future. I want to state unequivocally that the way you were treated was wrong and unChristlike and it should not have happened.

I do not expect sympathy for Christians crying oppression. They (We) are not oppressed.

I would like there to be understanding on both sides about why the opposite side feels the way that it does, so that, perhaps some years down the road, the hatred can stop and there can be healing.

You don't have to apologize for the actions of others. I'm just explaining to you why it is that Christians have such a bad name among non-Christians these days. Weirdly enough, I don't actually hate Christians (and I tend to tear capital-A Atheists a new asshole when they're being obnoxious about their anti-Christian rants). But boy HOWDY am I gun-shy around a newly introduced one until I figure out where they stand on things.

And, inevitably, that is going to hurt some who don't deserve it.

The rift between the Christian community--especially its more vocal and "conservative" element (although it baffles me to this day what they think they're "conserving" with their foolishness!)--and the non-Christian community will take time and effort to close. And, while this may seem unfair (and could very well be), it will be the Christians taking the bulk of the effort for this wound to heal.

@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:

But gaming is the work, and they just don't do it.

No. Entertainment is the work. Gaming is the medium for it. In game streaming you can entertain by being good at the game, entertain by being bad at the game but funny about it, or, apparently, by being dead sexy and playing the game.

In the end it is, however, the customer who decides what "service" it is they're willing to pay for (in dollars or in time spent with eyeballs on screen--whatever the currency).

It just makes it harder for women who just want to be gamers. Or... women online really. I'm not knocking sexuality, I'm knocking the women who use that sexuality because all it does is make it okay for other people to treat other women like that.

"I'm not knocking sexuality. I'm just knocking sexuality that doesn't go the way I want it to. And I'll try to elevate this into a 'sisterhood' thing so that it isn't obvious what's going on."

@Ghost: I don't know anything about you except what I see here in MSB. I don't know anything about @Cupcake beyond what I see here in MSB. I get that you have some kind of history with @Cupcake, but honestly dude? You're coming across as quite likely the biggest asshole this dysfunctional community has seen since the glory days of Mr. Bane.

You're being compared to Mr. Bane. You're not coming out as clearly better. You may want to reconsider how you do things.

@Miss-Demeanor said in Where's your RP at?:

Why are people so afraid to have characters die? Why is death such a terrible thing in a game?

There's a million possible answers to this question. Here are a few, but first your objections to provide some context.

Yeah, its the end of a story. Not the only story, just one of many. You can make a new story. Stories don't have to stop just because one person dies. The narrative continues under a new voice.

• I may not want to tell another story. There may have been things I wanted said in that story that just ended that I can't (or don't want to) tell in another way. E.g.: I'm playing a character that's doing the fall-and-redemption cycle. It gets killed shortly after the fall part. How do I do the redemption side? Introduce a new character, have it fall, then more than likely have it killed before the redemption? Lather. Rinse. Repeat?
• It may be that making characters on the game is a pain in the ass. While it's not as much of a problem as it used to be, it's still a pain in the ass to be out of play for several days while going through the pointless hoops a lot of games still throw up for the privilege of playing.
• In games where character "growth" (read: collecting bigger numbers and more shiny things) is slow and difficult, it's disheartening to be faced with that grind all over again.
• Even in cases of real character growth (as opposed to power-mongering) it's a slow, hard climb. All those IC connections you've built? Gone. All those friends you made IC? Time to start over. All those little bits of connection your character had to the setting, the bits that made the character an interesting part of the world? Vanished into nothingness. Time to start it all over again.

That's just a few reasons. I'm sure people here can come up with millions more.

Jane Siberry. Tea. Finding out by surprise that I get a four week paid vacation out of nowhere. Watching silkworms become balls of silk. Having a business I invested in/cofounded start to take off. Melting the minds of my students with some of my weirder musical tastes.

Calling the game's setting the "theme" is something that still baffles me to this very day.

Serious RL peeve: engineering companies who let their engineers write the documentation. Goes double when the engineers in question are EFL types. (EFL → English as their Fifteenth Language)

Engineers are barely able to communicate within their own circles. Why would you unleash them on people who are not in that circle without some editing for consistency and comprehensibility?

@fatefan said in Poll: RPG System for OC Hero Game:

@ZombieGenesis As someone who's played a bit of but not run Savage Worlds, what are the barriers for new players you're identifying with that system?

I can't answer for @ZombieGenesis, but I can answer for me.

I really wanted to like Savage Worlds. A lot of people whose opinions I (used to) respect sang hymns to it. They wrote long odes of praise of it. So when I went to Canada I spent the (to me) absurd amounts of my limited Canadian money to snag a copy of Savage Worlds Deluxe: Explorer's Edition.

To say I was underwhelmed would be a criminal offense of understatement. I was strongly disappointed (and it caused me to reevaluate the opinions of people whose taste I used to trust). I just cannot see what the fuss is over this game. It's a fairly simplistic game, but it isn't a simple one. And it is further so badly written that even though it may not be the most complicated game out there, it's incredibly hard to actually get into.

First the simplistic complexity: This is another one of those games where the rules are hidden within descriptions of other things. For example, environmental rules. What is the impact of wet conditions? Can you find that in the GM section under running the game? Nope. Maybe it's under situational rules? Not really, except possibly for the drowning rules. Oh, wait! I found something about wet conditions in the climbing rules! I see! That's elegant! Don't look under "wet conditions", look under the action you're trying to attempt! What about driving? … FUCK! No, that's not in the skill description, that's in its own section 90 pages after the driving skill. Or is it in the chase rules 80 pages afterwards?…

Everything in the rules is this way. Terms are used before definition. And this can be acceptable. (They do this in Fate Core as well sometimes.) But it only works if you PROPERLY CROSS-REFERENCE these things. Which Fate Core did, but Savage Worlds didn't.

And anyway, this is all beside the point. If the system were more coherent, there'd be a set of standard modifiers and the explanations of situations and conditions would reference these without being absolutely necessary. A coherent system lets you apply on-the-fly judgement with simplicity. There is no such coherence in the Savage Worlds game system. A decent bonus/penalty is an adjustment by 2, and you see that all sorts of places. Except where you don't. Where different adjustments are used because reasons.

Here's an interesting challenge. Take someone who is an experienced role-player. Hand them the Savage Worlds rules book. Tell them to make a character. Any character. DO NOT HELP THEM WITH IT. See how long it takes them to correctly make a character. (The key word there is "correctly". There's a few pitfalls along the way caused by unclear writing and poor organization.)

What are some of the pitfalls? Well it took me ages to finally figure out what "novice" and "seasoned" and such meant in picking up edges. I mean hey, those words are used everywhere. Surely they're in the index? Nope. Well surely they're defined before first point of use? Nope. They're defined after all the edges in the advancement rules.

And that only masks the fact that edges themselves aren't really defined in a read-through of how to make a character, nor are they cross-referenced properly so you can flip forward quickly while making your character.

(Oh, for bonus marks, try and figure out how to make the Archetypes using the actual rules for making characters. Hint: as far as I can tell this is not possible. The Archetypes aren't possible in the rules. But I may be wrong; I may have missed some obscure piece buried in the section on finding lost dog bones or soemthing.)

So, let's say you read the game word for word, cover to cover. Then you read it again so you understand the rules. What do you get? You get a game that's ... nothing special. It's miniatures-focused and they SO DESPERATELY want to sell you on more things: world books, special card decks, miniatures, templates, etc. (It's a bit off-putting, that.) But the core system is a routine roll a die against a target number. The schtick is that the die type changes, as do the numbers you add or subtract to the result, but the target number is the same. Oh, and you have the "wild die" which serves mainly to make it hard to judge the odds. Oh, and you have "bennies" (which in inimitable fashion are referenced a dozen times before being described ... and then in their description refer to other undefined things; yes I'm harping on this!). It's just not that great a game system. It's OK. I mean it's not a terrible system. I've seen many worse ones. I just don't get the hype in some circles.

And that's the reason it went from "bleah" to "yuck" for me: the hype. In certain fan circles SW is the Second Coming of Gaming. I spent too much of my own, rare, Canadian currency to get a copy. And it was nothing special that was compounded by being badly written nothing special.

That being said, I love a lot of the world books. I just won't be using Savage Worlds itself with them.

Unicode. The standard, the consortium, and the people on it. All of it together. It's a festering pile of shit.

But…

Until recently it was the best we had. For whatever reason TRON Encoding never really took off. This left us with a billion other subtly incompatible and immiscible ways of doing mixed-language text that were half-baked and horrible to use. In comes Unicode to the rescue!

But…

Today, twenty-four years after Unicode was first released as a standard it has utterly failed in even covering all the "glyphs" (a typical horrific piece of Unicode jargon) used in major world languages. There are literally millions of people who cannot properly write their names in Unicode's characters. In some languages inappropriate combining must be done to approximate the real glyphs. In others the glyphs don't exist in any form at all, combined or otherwise. This despite seven major revisions (and innumerable minor ones) of the standard.

Along the way we've seen a dozen things like the political and technical stupidity that is the Han Unification. (Know what it is and disagree with why it's stupid? Well, under the logic of the Han Unification, most European languages really belong under a hypothetical Greek Unification because of the massive overlap in both characters and history between Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. I mean really, what's the difference between A and А or P and Р? There's no reason to separate them! Hell even N and И are clearly variants of the same glyph! Stupid, no? Same applies to Han Unification.)

So... with seven major revisions behind us we still can't write everybody's name even in the major languages. (You don't want to know what being in a minority language group is like!) But with 7.0 we got this festering turd of an addition. On the down side: a few million people can't actually write their names yet. On the up side, however, they can at least express their discontent at this in ways that are disarmingly creative (�, code point 1F4A9, PILE OF POO) and they can be diverse when doing it! Because the hard-working members of the Unicode consortium have been tirelessly slaving to ensure that you can use cutesy icons when communicating, but not on, you know, making it possible to actually write your name!

TL;DR Unicode jumped the shark with 7.0. It's hard to take this shit seriously any longer.

@mietze said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

If that makes me "entitled" so be it, but I have enough dealing with mentally ill/selfish or narcissistic/emotional vampires in my RL extended family and volunteering organizations at present that I could not tolerate it in my recreational activities. When I did, or attempted to, the outcome was not well received by the other person ever and certainly didn't improve my experience in the hobby.

Emphasized for truth.

It's OK to ask that I'm a bit careful around common trigger issues (like rape, say, or excessive gore). In the end, however, it is up to the triggered people to get the fuck out of things that trigger them. Demanding that everybody around them conform to their psychological quirks is hubris at a level that staggers the imagination.

And lest someone screech "PRIVILEGE" at me, I have my own fucking trigger. It's a circumstance that happens a whole fucking lot in dramatic fiction of all stripes--even in CHILDREN'S LITERATURE. It's the kind of thing that if it catches me unaware it can fuck up a day (or longer, in my weaker moments) as I work through some very complicated (and once-crippling) emotional and mental states that have been going on for about two decades now.

I'm going to guess that not a single person who's ever played with me over the past two decades knows what that trigger is. They may have even seen the trigger go off and not recognized that it happened. This is because I kind of think that it would be shitty of me to dump my emotional triggers onto other people who are just playing a fucking game.

If your triggers are such that you can't make this considerate, considered decision, then fuck yeah, I don't want you anywhere near a hobby of pretendy fun-time games! And if that makes me an asshole, fine, so be it, consider me to be your personal asshole placed on the world solely to make you miserable.

edited to add

For a clue as to just how wide-ranging this trigger of mine is:

1. I was unable to read all the way through Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale the first time because I got blind-sided by it. It took three YEARS before I had the courage to pick up the book and face it again. And it was a rough ride even when forewarned and prepared.
2. One of my favourite books as a child--The Little Prince--is a book I can only read with great caution these days. I have to start from a good place to not emerge from it a wreck.
3. Naguib Mahfouz's (in?)famous Cairo Trilogy took me eight tries to get through because the motherfucker blindsided me, like, every fiftieth page or so.
4. There's two episodes of Star Trek (the real one, not the latter-day shit rip-offs) I can't really enjoy any longer because of this trigger.

When I say this trigger happens a whole fucking lot, I really mean it!

Dumb shits (on either side of the two-tone US political "spectrum") who say they'll "move to Canada" when something doesn't go their way in US politics.

First, fuck you! Like we want your dangerously toxic politics imported into our country any more than they already have been. Stay in your own little cesspool, nicely sequestered from the rest of the world.

Second, could you do just a little research before spewing your tripe? Wanna move to Canada because the SCOTUS legalized gay marriages nationally? Guess what, Einstein!? We've had legalized gay marriages nation-wide since 2005…

So just stay in your little Hellhole. Don't bother us.

࿘卐 HITLER WAS HERE 卍࿗

Libertarian Law Enforcement

@Luna said:

@WTFE 240s to the 150s! So like woah and yes! Thank you!!

From 180kg (396 pounds) to about 120kg here. I know the pain.

TL;DR: <rant>Thin people exist. "Fat" is not a synonym for "realistic".</rant>

Why the everloving flying fuck is "realistic" always code for "fat" in certain media circles? It's as if people have forgotten that, you know, thin, fit people actually exist. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not on-side with so-called "fat shaming" in the slightest. (I'm absolutely the last person on the planet who's in a position to fat shame, after all!) But this recent thing of not just thin shaming but actual thin erasure is getting on my fucking nerves.

Using an example from this execrable bit of reprehensible reportage:

Every day at lunch time I see literally over a thousand young women walk past me on their way to the canteen who look, in terms of body shape, like the image to the left. I'll see maybe a dozen who look like the image to the right. Where I am, the image to the left is the "realistic" one and the one to the right is the "unrealistic" one if you want to go by numbers.

I'm sorry, Americans (as well as Brits and my fellow Canadians) that you've normalized obesity to the point that healthy and fit individuals are not merely "unrealistic" but apparently entirely absent from your worldview. But you know? Thin and fit individuals do exist. There's a picture I shared of the Wuhan flood in another thread:

The woman in that picture? She exists. And indeed she's not even exceptional. When school is in session I literally see a thousand who look just like her walk past me every day, and I work on a tiny campus.

So, fat shaming? Yeah. That's bad. It's terrible. Do it in my presence and you'll find out what it's like to have a significant fraction of a ton sitting on your chest. (Yes, that's me making a fat joke at my own expense.) But you know what's equally bad or perhaps even worse? Pretending that a huge number of people (counted in the billions) don't exist, or shaming the ones you find, because you've internalized and normalized obesity.

Headline writers. What would the world be like without the wonky, zany antics of these?

This is emblematic of the entire state of software to me for some reason.

My collection of weird-ass playing cards has expanded.

This is radically different in character from the others (aside from being weird and trippy, I mean). These are hand-made cards finished with tung oil. This gives them a lovely feel and scent. Unfortunately the tung oil is quite fresh on these and will require some more curing before they stop sticking to each other.