To go along with the Open Thread for Personal Stuff I just put up, here’s an Open Thread for everything else. As always, NO TROLLS, NO MRAs.
Categories
Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff: Late July 2015 Splashy Splashy Edition
When did the group become invite-only? I thought it was open when I joined it. I understand the reasoning, now I just wonder if I joined the wrong group…
Found it!
Yes please!
@Binjabreel: I’ve been seeing that all over the net.
Who’s T-Pain?Awesome! Soon everyone will know the joy that is Opinions About Gay Space Rocks!@maistrechat: That’s my fault, I thought invites were required but it turns out to still be public. Sorry.
@AllisonW, @Binjabreel, it’s both a comedy and a drama. It’s both fantasy and sci-fi. It’s both shoujo and shonen. I love it. I don’t think I’ve felt this way about a cartoon since Last Airbender. And Beloved is loving it!
@Pie: Well, that just further cements my determination not to join Twitter.
Thanks, Falconer. 🙂 I actually am FAR too familiar with Steam. I was really just asking what the NAME of the Steam group is, so that I could try to join. BTW, as far as that goes, I’m pretty sure on Steam everyone has a unique name. I think you can pick non-unique names as display names, but you’ve got a unique account name that you use to sign in. You can find it by going to settings. You should be able to add friends and search for profiles by account name.
addendum: by far too familiar, I mean that I have, in the past, been in the habit of buying up any cheap game that looks interesting during the many sales, resulting in me having hundreds of games in my library, only a small fraction of which I’ve actually played at all, let alone completed.
anyone here should feel free to friend me if they’d like, however. i’m:
fnord3125
and if anyone here plays either Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm and doesn’t mind playing with a newbie, feel free to friend me to battlenet as well:
fnord3125#1158
@Falconer
OK friend request sent
@Brian Peters
I play Hearthstone and I’m a newbie as well. I’ll send you a request as well.
It me!
I am ashamed to admit I haven’t actually read any of the Illuminatus! trilogy, only that which the uber fans at Steve Jackson Games have put into their RPG supplements, but I know from the fnord.
Falconer: To read the Illuminatus! trilogy, grab any three sci-fi/conspiracy books, run them through a shredder, then put them back together. They’re not bad, but they do have a whole hell of a lot of “I was on drugs while writing this” bits.
I read the Illuminatus! trilogy about 18ish years ago, when I was a teenager in high school, and it blew my barely-formed brain (and lead to me establishing fnord3125 as my perpetual user name anywhere i can get it) I haven’t ever re-read it… and lately I’ve been thinking I probably need to as I fairly recently listened to an episode of the Read it and Weep podcast which is a bad books/movie/tv/etc podcast in which they “read” (I think all of them listened to an audiobook version) of the first part of the trilogy and one complaint they all had was how racist and misogynistic they felt it was, and I’m wondering if that’s true and I missed it. It certainly would have been very easy for me to miss as a white, straight, cis, teenage male… though I suspect some of their perception of racism was due to the audio book format in that they talked about (and even played a clip of) the narrator talking in a very stereotypical/racist Chinese accent.
I also have several of Robert Anton Wilson’s non fiction books, and I recall that one of them in particular had a section in which he goes into a lot of ideas about “misandry” and at the time I first read it, I felt like “Holy crap, he’s got some really great points!” about stuff like hidden “anti-male” messages in media and now, while I haven’t read that book for ages, just thinking about I’m wondering what the hell I was thinking back then. The man had a lot of strange ideas. I think some are probably worth considering, and some are at least a little bonkers.
I’m definitely glad I read the Illuminatus! books and I probably read them at the right time in my life. It changed how I think about books and stories and things like unreliable narrators and non-linear storytelling. I wouldn’t try to offer any guarantees about the extent to which I think it’s a worthwhile expenditure of energy and reading time now though… not without looking at it again with (slightly) more mature eyes.
yikes. I wish you could edit posts here. my previous post was terribly written and makes me ashamed as an English major. hopefully it’s relatively comprehensibly regardless.
I had a similar experience with the Illuminatus! trilogy and RAW in general. I re-read it a couple of years ago and I’d say that it’s too much a product of the ’60s (white) counter-culture that had some serious blind spots with regard to race and gender issues. I do think that RAW tried to present a progressive take on those issues but was held back by some unconscious prejudices.
Regardless, I much prefer Principia discordia, which had a way bigger impact on the person I am today than it maybe should have.
I know that feel.
Sometimes I go back and just watch “The Return” / “Jailbreak” because the pathos of watching Jasper win and the catharsis of watching Garnet kick her butt gives me smiles for hours after.
I thought that was just how you Steam.
http://vine.co/v/M75BWzADxqi
stop making me want a dog.
but as long as we’re posting cute animal stuff… i also want one of these rabbits.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aUMugHXoDjw/T9Gd-QdDT3I/AAAAAAAAB80/ySQS4ElhxZk/s1600/flemish+giant+rabbit+images.jpg
Oh my god that pug is a little pug loaf.
Oh noes! Now I want a pug again. Seriously, I really want to get a pug and name it Pugsley one day, but most people whom I know keep insisting that they’re annoying and snort a lot. Oh well.
Anyway, Brian, not sure if you’re new here, but if you are, welcome!
Those pugs! That rabbit!
Oh, we’ve been pet broody for aaaages. Hoping to get one of each of these little guys soon:
http://www.warrenphotographic.co.uk/photography/cats/25620.jpg
alaisvex:
thanks! I’m newish. I’ve been a regular reader for quite some time but rarely post. this may be the first time I’ve posted more than one comment in a single thread.
Check out this great timewaster, picbreeder. Image evolution.
Ugh. Another shooting in a movie theater. 2 dead, 8 injured, and the shooter apparently killed himself, though it’s not clear if he’s being counted as one of the 2. Apparently by an “older white male,” 20 minutes into a screening of Trainwreck, the Amy Schumer comedy.
http://hollywoodlife.com/2015/07/23/lafayette-louisiana-shooting-trainwreck-movie-theater-shooter-dead-victims/
MSNBC says there are reports the guy was chasing after a woman, but that’s not confirmed.
@katz:
Believe it or not, I once wrote a java program that did something very similar for “Chaos Game” style fractals. I was even wondering what it’d be like to turn it into a web-app and have groups guide the evolution via voting. That’s awesome!
I just saw that, about the shooting. Now that it’s been mentioned here, I have to wonder if the manosphere is going to try to blame it on Amy Schumer being too slutty/opinionated/fat/whatever else they think women are doing wrong at all times.