Like a lot of people in the US of A, I am taking a long weekend. Posting may be a little light for a bit. So here’s an open thread for everyone else taking a long weekend. Or not. Use this thread for anything that’s not personal. Like misogyny, politics, kitties, you know the drill. (Though kitties are welcome in all threads, of course.)
I am hoping my long weekend turns out a bit better than that of the people in the Australian movie of that name from 1978, which I keep meaning to see. Apparently their little beach vacation doesn’t go so well, and they are attacked by … nature? At one point, I believe, they face off against an enraged dugong. (No, really.) The movie was recently remade, but apparently the remake wasn’t as good.
Stay tuned for more reviews of movies I haven’t seen and that I’m just giving vague impressions of based on things I’ve heard somewhere.
Yeah, but if you’re fighting demons to the Fae, It’s essential.
…
…too much D&D.
White Wolf too.
Pecunium — you see the Pollock “gem” I dropped on the previous page? Ken seems cool enough, Pollock…no. Just no.
The whole comment was an editor’s note at the end of their news roundup about the posters Men’s Rights Edmonton put up. It’s not jumbled, just hilarious:
Editorial note: These events are, by far, the most widely covered men’s rights efforts by the media to date. For the next several days members of Men’s Rights Edmonton and by extension the broader MHRM will have exposure they have never had before. It is important that those reading this post contact the above mentioned news sources and educate them about our movement in order to strike the iron while hot. Below are links to other articles concerning this issue and their numbers are growing by the hour. Lets keep it going, shall we!!!!
OM Fucking God.
Pollock passed the bar some where. Popehat has a great takedown of Orson Scott Card, and I decided to scan it to see if Pollock was being a Pillock. he is, on abortion/choice (did you know there is no dispute about a fetus having rights?), and he says he once passed a bar exam.
Fuck yeah, he knows he was being dishonest. Even a bad lawyer knows that his arguments where inconsistent, and failed to “pick up” the arguments of his opponents.
I was too nice to him, by half.
Argenti: I did. I read every single word the asshole wrote. Much of it two/three times. It’s why I was an emotional mess come Sunday Evening.
Leftwingfox.Yeah, but if you’re fighting demons to the Fae, It’s essential.
That is a quirk of how Iron tools feel. It’s not that it was worked cold (cold-worked Iron gets too brittle). It’s that when you pick up a piece of Iron it feels colder than stone, glass, copper, or bronze.
(way too much time reading Irish/Celtic mythology).
Of course he would to both. I have zero problem seeing hm as a dude who thinks that women are incubators with no rights to autonomy.
Yeah, well, it didn’t stop the designers of 3rd Edition from charging out the wazoo for cold iron weapons.
I mean, double the base cost of the weapon and +2,000 gp on the cost of every enchantment.
They say it’s mined deep underground and worked at a lower temperature than regular iron.
Kinda took the romance out of it a bit.
There’s a reason I’m a 2Ed. kinda guy. As a DM, Iron was iron. You wanted to make it special with magick™ then go find a local mage willing to do the work. Pay your money, take your chances (as with all else).
I have very little tolerance for people spackling stupid onto extant mythos.
I cant’ wait to see some piece of the Manosphere latch onto this womn hires hitman to kill husband, collect insurance, save money on divorce.
Ugh, not following that link. This is somewhat of a derail, but I’ve never understood the “I don’t want to be involved with you any more so I don’t care if you live or die” mindset. There have been a couple of breakups where I was pretty angry with my ex for a while, but it was angry in the sense of “don’t talk to me for a while”, not in the sense of wishing violence upon them. Even in those cases if I heard now that anything bad had happened to them later it would make me sad.
To re-rail, witness my complete lack of surprise that Pollock is anti-choice too. There are some complicated mental gymnastics that some guys in the SFF use to justify their shitty behavior/attitude towards women, but the more I see of him the more clear it is that his problem is straight-up women-aren’t-people. He’s clever enough to know that’s not a socially acceptable opinion and try to conceal it, but not clever enough to succeed in doing so.
It’s a straighforward recounting of her being arrested (undercover cop). I didn’t watch the video.
I’m not sure Pollock is anti-choice, so much as pure asshole. His argument seems to be be (I refuse do dive in again), that choice is good, but the arguments are suspect.
Which is worse, actually, than being anti-choice. It’s (gasp) anti-agency.
So he’s defending anti-choice arguments purely because women being allowed to have either agency opinions irritates him. We seem to be back to women-aren’t-people again.
It must be confusing to want to fuck people who you dislike and think poorly of in general. No wonder sexist dudes are so pissy all the time.
RE: Falconer
Speaking of games, we got Dragon Age: Origins in the pawn shop for $11! (We use a friend’s PS3.) Me and Sneak have been playing it. Having a lot of fun, though it’s making Sneak remember how badly zie misses having a pet; zie’s playing with the dog character a lot.
Cassandra: I’m not sure. It might be that non-white people don’t deserve agency either.
Or he may be a classic troll, just stirring shit with arguments he knows will get reactions.
Either way, he’s a fuckmupppet.
He’s not setting off my troll-dar, just my asshole-dar. I think he’s both sincere and horrible.
@Pecunium: I think one of the design philosophies behind 3E (and sadly the reason that the 3.5 core books are like 256 pages apiece) is that they’re going to answer ALL THE QUESTIONS because isn’t it just tragic that a DM might have to make a call. Another one is that they were really pushing consistency, because to give them credit, if the DM is making a whole lot of calls, zie might get confused or forget one (I know I forget stuff I’ve said as the DM all the time, it’s busted at least one of my plots when the party goes AHA!!).
But the result is a fantasy that’s really mechanistic. (I mean, more mechanistic than a game with readily-reproducible supernatural effects already is.)
I think I might actually enjoy 2nd more than 3rd. We had a lot of fun playing a B/X game back in February, gosh, less than four days before the sprouts were born.
@LBT: I was wanting to play Dragon Age over the long weekend, but I couldn’t find my copy 🙁
I mean, I spent all these months since the move looking for my copies of Skyrim, XCOM, and the last three Zelda titles, and found them in a cabinet when I thought they were in a box, and now DA is in a box somewhere when I thought it was on a shelf. >:(
I’m glad Sneak is enjoying the dog. I like him, too, and I never found the dog in Fallout 3.
The problem with the dog in Fallout 1 is that there’s a laser trap hallway and you can’t get Dogmeat to sit and stay, if he’s in the party, he WILL follow you down.
DA has a lot of stylized gore, in that there aren’t any internal organs but a lot of blood splashes around. It doesn’t sound like it’s giving you a problem. I remember a convo back more than a year ago in which I said DA approached Kill Bill levels of bloodletting (although I don’t think I put it like that).
I swear there’s a connection between those two first sentences, but I’m demmed if I can spot it now.
Here’s a story about that woman trying to hire a hitman that tells the story in non-video form (though the video is there too):
http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf/2013/07/video_former_nj_woman_caught_hiring_hit_man_to_kill_husband.html
What’s really odd is that her husband asked that she not receive any jail time.
I know they talked about it on r/mr at least once:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1hvq2o/heartless_wife_attempts_to_solicit_hitman_to_kill/
RE: Falconer
Ah, the trevails of moving. You’ll probably eventually find the game wedged in the sofa cushions or something.
I turned off the ‘persistent gore’ effects, and Sneak recently watched Let’s Plays of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and both American McGee’s Alice games. Zie’s been doing some serious thinking about violence in video games and what it means to zer, but zie seems to be handling Dragon Age well enough. We’re still new in, only just now finished the first battle that axes Duncan. When our party actually gets big enough that we’ll have to pick and choose, Sneak’s going to be so saddened.
We’re going to most likely be playing it without any romance subplots, and since Sneak’s playing, we’re going to be as nice and good a character as humanly possible. Still getting used to the interface. (SO MANY MENUS.)
Oh, I guess I didn’t think about turning gore off.
I don’t like romance subplots either, but the one time I set out to get Shepard back with Williams, I failed. All Shepard did was look at her photo and sigh where I think there was supposed to be some BOW CHIKA going on.
… Man one of these days I will finish a video game, I swear.
RE: Falconer
Config is our friend, and shall be forevermore.
We tend to play till it’s done. Considering how ENORMOUS Dragon Age is, and that we don’t actually own the console for it, it’s unlikely we will finish it any time soon. We’ll TRY, though.
We’re just going to try and be friends with everybody. It’s the Sneak way. (Though damn, I hope we manage to find some armor that doesn’t show cleavage. I know it’s possible, just what the hell? We ain’t playing for Boob Armor.)
I’m reading all the controversy over the SFWA magazine and keep running into guys whining that there’s nothing wrong with bikini armor, which is annoying enough normally (psst, dudes – women don’t keep our vital organs in our boobs, which means our torsos need to be covered my armor). What makes it even more annoying is that the backdrop is snow. I guess women are supposed to be immune to the cold as well as to a sword through the guts?
re DMing. I guess I’m prettyu good at notes/plot-points. I also do a lot of scketching of scene in my head. So if someone decides to hare off after some special spell/thingy I didn’t put in the game, I have a way to go to get them to that place.
It’s interactive theater. Lots of time in pubs, inns, town squares.
And reproducible… not quite so much.
Also, some things can be too good to be true. I once had a character taking damage because of his armor (the beastie was using him as a club. So there was only so much the armor could do to protect him from the effects of the armor: it was good armor, being smashed into a wall, an altar, another PC wasn’t going to hurt IT much. The stuff inside the armor was a little less durable).
Off to go see Carbon Leaf
This, is a damned fine song, but they do much less topical stuff too.