Posts made by WTFE

HitchBOT survived a trip across Canada. It survived a trip across Germany. It was destroyed two weeks into a trip across the USA.

WTF, America!? This is why you (and specifically you!) can't have nice things.

Lynn Anderson

This is where someone tells me she died in 1996.

…What just happened here?

Well it's what happened for me for sure. I checked the day and month, not the year.

And apparently it's the weed freaks that are circulating him around because apparently he was a big promoter of weed.

Well, shit. How come he's showing up in social media streams now? What political cause is fastening on to him?

Jim Rockford James Garner

Got Rhythm?

I'm averaging about 850 or so each time I try it.

I'm with you on GURPS, @Thenomain. In the '90s I had a bunch of friends who were all about the GURPS and tried to turn every possible setting or campaign into a GURPS version. I stopped gaming with these friends for close to a decade because of this seeing as I, you know, absolutely fucking hated GURPS.

It's a point value system that can't decide if points measure utility or difficulty. It is, thus, incredibly hackable to the point that I described GURPS character points as "measuring nothing but how much your character costs in GURPS character points".

It has all the complexity and slowdown problems of "crunchy" systems without any actual verisimilitude, arguably the only real benefit of using a system heavy on the crunch. (An epic Usenet flamewar with this guy led to Yet Another GURPS Patch in Yet Another GURPS Supplement because he was so stung by accusations that GURPS was unrealistic way back when.)

The genre books often pretty much just rewrote the game rules almost from scratch, keeping only a tiny core of the game rules alive. The result was such that it was often as much work as learning a whole new (better suited) game system over learning the GURPS variant in use for a given genre.

@Rainbow-Unicorn said:

I do me some Savage Worlds. Another great system not being used enough.

Based on recommendations like yours I actually went and bought myself a copy of Savage Worlds.

…

I don't get it. I mean, I get the rules. They're pretty simple. I don't get the rabid love for the game, though. I don't understand the appeal in the slightest. It looks like Yet Another RPG to me.

So this happened in my neck of the woods today.

This is a source of RL Anger on several grounds.

• First, the Captain Obvious issue: how the FUCKING FUCK do you "forget" to screw down the access plate after servicing your escalator? People who did that need to get shoved down the neighbouring escalator just as an illustrative lesson in care and attention. (Not for them, obviously. For those who follow.)
• Second, the mother did the right thing in shoving her son forward. It's tragic that this is also probably what killed her. See, escalators typically have a huge empty space right at about where that plate fell down that's big enough for two adults to stand in while working on the machinery. Had she fell straight down she'd have been safe. Injured, yes. But not dead. Since, however, she had to push her son forward to rescue him, she was angled back and got caught up in the machinery. This is what killed her.
• Third, while the actions of the three staffers there were laudable in intent, they contributed to her death. One (correctly) caught the child and dragged him to safety. One (also correctly) caught on to the woman and tried to hold on to her, ultimately a futile task. The third one, however, stood there and looked on in horror (or tried to do the same as the second) and this is what turned what would have been undoubtedly serious injuries into fatal ones. Had the third one taken a half-step to the right and pressed the fucking cut-off switch (you can see the cover for it once the trash can gets knocked over) the mother would likely have been crushed a little, perhaps lightly lacerated, but otherwise alive. Since, however, she, like most Chinese people, is completely oblivious to her surroundings and what things actually mean (the lack of intellectual curiosity here is a constant piss-off factor for me), she doesn't know to do this. (I just sat my wife down and forced her to watch the video with me again, pointing out where the cut-off switch is and how to use it. Just to make sure that my wife, at least, comprehends the idea of shutting things the fuck off.)
• Fourth, comments on news sites. Holy fuck are people assholes. I think the worst reaction by far, though, and it's one I've seen everywhere, is "Oh, what's one dead Chinese person to a country with 1.6 billion?" The staggering, shit-headed hypocrisy of this is truly astonishing. In the same sentence that these shitheels imply that the Chinese just don't care about the lives of other Chinese, they are themselves showing exactly that same "ho-hum, another dead person" attitude they're trying to decry.

I tried to put them behind spoilers but couldn't figure out the Magic Incantations for that. If someone can point those out to me, I can fix the pictures.

@Roz said:

The reason that this kind of artistic reimagining of female characters happens is because the vast majority of them are significantly smaller than the average woman. And, like, the fact that you're calling that image which looks to me like probably around a size 10 or so (still smaller than average) to have "Thunder Thighs" and would "waddle around" is pretty gross.

The thighs in that picture are larger than the head. I'm a pretty fat guy still and my thighs, at my peak (4 pounds shy of 400!) were never larger around than my head.

Those, my friend, are thunder thighs.

This broad setting thing was an issue at Castle d'Image. They tried to open up a city for "rogueish" RPG, but it was on the other side of the IC country from the titular castle. And nobody was there when it opened (obviously). And nobody continued to be there because everybody and all the action was at the titular castle and its environs and they never managed to quite get that critical mass of people wanting to play in the city. Eventually it was just another ghost town part of the grid that only newbs wandered into by accident.

The Lara Croft on the right has thunder thighs and hips way wider than her shoulders. I'm not holding up the one on the left as especially realistic. (It's a fucking cartoon caricature in a game, after all!) I'm saying that the one on the right is perhaps an American's (or Brit's or Canadian's) idea of "realistic" in that the three fattest major nations on the planet would tend to see that.

And note, I'm also emphatically not saying that everybody should look like the one on the left (even in non-caricature form) nor that someone who looks like the one on the right is somehow a bad person. I'm saying that erasing the one on the left as if people like this don't exist is a bad thing.

@Roz said:

Either way, it's not equally bad or worse, since fat-shaming is connected to actual discrimination, which reduction of portrayals of thin women in media is not.

But you know what is actual discrimination? The backlash of "thin-shaming" that I've increasingly seen over the past decade. If we're to go with the typical shit I see in certain political circles, my wife is unhealthily thin. She's probably bulimic, the narrative goes, or at the very least anorexic. (Yes, I've had assholes have the nerve to say this in response to photographs that have my wife in them.) Never mind that she's one of approximately 600 million people for whom this is ordinary weight and build (along with that chick in the flood pic). They seem to utterly miss the point (big surprise there!) that fat shaming is bad because body shaming in general is bad.

Shaming people for their body, whether fat, thin, tall, short, long-fingered, stubby-fingered, dark-skinned, light-skinned, blue-eyed, black-eyed, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum is bad. Period. The fact that currently one body type is in vogue in media (thin) is not an excuse to dump on people who hold that body type. Fat people mocking thin people is just as bad as the opposite. Indeed I'd argue that it's worse because fat people are on the receiving end of such barbs a whole lot (trust me!), frequently being held up as examples of people with "poor self-discipline" and some form of "moral failure" and thus should know better how hurtful and unjust it is.

Demanding that all media everywhere match three fat nations' conceptions of normalcy is an additional pile of idiocy atop all that, especially when you get what would amount to "Thunder Thighs Croft" waddling around athletically through mazes and traps….

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.

@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.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that your old corsets being too big is "congratulations!" time.

CONGRATULATIONS!

No idea. All I've got is the image.

We houseruled that "level drain" effects were constitution drains in our games. Never thought of using them as hit point overflow.