#rantypants

[embervoices]

I have this rule of thumb.

If someone is going on about how something promotes "Pedophilia" and should be stopped, I mentally swap in "Murder" or "Theft" and check if it still makes any damned sense.

Because a lot of shit gets labelled things like "Pedophilia" not because it bears any resemblance to causing that problem, but because adding that label makes it hard to argue without people thinking you're a horrible person, no matter how utterly irrelevant and illogical it actually is.

"Nobody should ever write stories about murder" isn't a thing anybody says.

But we all agree, murder is wrong, yeah?

So, why do we think writing murder mysteries isn't wrong?

Okay. Great. Glad we're on the same page. Now, so, about queer young adult fiction...

[occasionallybagel]

Gates to Infinity hardly has any pokemon in it though.

*Breathes in* BOi. Quantity does NOT equal Quality. It’s every OTHER problem that makes me almost despise Super.

The only thing I think Super does right is story, which is great. However, when that story is surrounded by one of the most handholdy, restrictive pokemon games i’ve played in ages, it makes me NOT want to play through it a second time. At NO point in the story does the game let you just STOP and have fun, it’s always pushing you forward. At one point you are given a world to explore, and IMMIDIEALTY funneled back into the story which takes place in a single location. It gives you the world, and slaps you in the face for trying to explore it. I think it relies way to heavily on the story, that it forgets to be a decent game as well. Which is equally baffling in design choices. No random missions, way too over leveled opponents early on that you legit have to cheese to defeat, levelling that HARDLY Even MATTERS AND ENDS UP BEING USELESS IN THE END. I don’t care if it has every single pokemon to use, how many to you end up using anyway? You only finally get the freedom I crave in the endgame, and by that time, I hardly care enough to continue paying.

Gates to Infinity while limited in the different pokemon, gives you so much more freedom to just have fun your own way. The pokeparadise you build, the constant loop of finding new materials to build and upgrade your facilities, the dungeon crawling which doesn’t make me fear walking into a damn room every time, levelling up actually matters, you’re constantly growing and being rewarded in GTI, which is how a good game is made. A constant feeling of progression, which Super really lacks. The story is a little too ‘hope hope, happy happy yay’ childish but i’m still having more fun than being forced through narrative at breakneck speed. It’s not impressive, probably one of the weaker PMD stories, but the gameplay is fun and free enough to know I don’t need to be babied through it. I’d rather take a smaller roster of characters if it means the ones I do have are fun and well developed enough.

*breathes out* hOooooo.... 

tl dr: GTI > SMD, don’t bring the #bringbacknatdex argument into this when the whole game is just up it’s own ass about the story and babies the player too much.

[fluffmugger]

Quick reminder: If you mock me for typos on rapidfire chat I will absolutely eat you and shit out your corpse.  

My hands do not work properly.  I am fairly upfront about this.   And we are in the middle of a winter cold snap that has exacerbated the underlying issues so badly I have managed to get chilblains in double digit weather.    It is not bad enough to make what I type unreadable, but there are typos where you can clearly see that despite my best efforts, my fingers have operated at a wildly different striking order than I have commanded them to.  Sass me on it and you’re heading straight to werribee.

[amuseoffyre]

Every time I see Jesus Christ Superstar, I get so angry about the church of the middle ages deciding that the Madonna/Whore paradigm was essential in the representation of the women around Jesus. (I suspect I have ranted about this in the past...)

The Mary Magdalene seen in modern pop culture and almost every adaptation is the ex-prostitute and implied love interest of Jesus. Why does a woman have to be defined by her relationship to a dude/dudes she has previously slept with and thus made herself ‘sinful’? There were whole bunches of women in Jesus’ gang! I’m fairly sure he wasn’t involved with all of them, if any. And hey, what about the other apostles? Maybe they were involved? What about them? Huh? HUH? But no. Always Mary and Jesus, because Obviously that’s the only reason he would have her around. Bah.

It will never not annoy me that they decided hey, we’ll just smash together Mary Magdalene (aka the demon-possessed woman, who was wealthy enough to become the financial sponsor and supporter of the Judea Walking Tour of Jesus), the ‘sinful’ woman who bought the most expensive gift she could to anoint him out of respect (may or may not have been a sex worker. There were a lot of things that made people sinful in those days) and Mary of Bethany, the extremely stressed homebody who wanted to make sure everything was perfect for her guest if only her stupid sister would get off her bum and make herself useful instead of just sitting around and listening to Jesus talk theology.

Women are more than the chaste virgins, the virtuous mothers or the repentant sinful women. They are anxious, generous, fussy, tempestuous, worried, loyal, worshipful and everything in between. They are definitely more than just love interests for someone who has far more important and worrying stuff in his future. #notallmarys

[aeriktirel]

STOP FUCKING DOING THIS ON THE MARKET BOARD, YOU ASSHATS.

Stop undercutting by thousands and TENS OF THOUSANDS of gil. This is almost a 19k undercut, it’s ridiculous! Especially when they’re *selling* for nearly 84k a pop.

[valoisfulcanelli]

Oh dear

I’m feeling grumpy about certain Sims-related things again. I really want to make a post about self-promotion of Sims stories in general, but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do that when I’m in this frame of mind. So all I will say is this: 

When a thread asks you to post a link to your story site, that does not mean “turn this thread into your personal story update thread”.

Oh, and also this:

When someone creates a new thread asking you to recommend other great Sims stories that you’ve read*, that is not the place to promote your own content. Promote someone else. It’s tacky at best to say “read my story!” when someone is asking for recommendations for stories that you’ve read and loved.

*Sure, if they’re only asking for any stories to read, promote yourself if you want. But if they’re asking for personal recommendations, that’s not the place to shove your own story out there.

[embervoices]

Protecting people from ideas is mind control.

It's perfectly reasonable to exercise control over your own mind. That is exactly what content labels and trigger warnings are for.

It is not acceptable to insist on controlling other people's minds. That's what censorship is for.

Learn the difference between protecting people from dangers and protecting people from the idea of those dangers.

[amuseoffyre]

As much as I enjoyed parts of Wonder Woman, one thing has bothered me since I heard about it in the pre-production planning stages: Zeus.

There was absolutely zero reason to involve him, especially in the way that they did. Let's start with the film itself and the fact that Zeus was the best and loveliest and kindest and goodest and most wonderfulest of all the Gods

Wtf? What mythology have you been smoking? Zeus would literally put his knob in anything and then some. Sometimes while in animal form. And wasn't he the... golden shower fella? I mean, not that they defined what kind of shower of gold he fell in, but come on.

Aside from the gross mischaracterisation of Our Pervert who Art In Olympus, I am still superpissed about this because the Diana I first read was the one formed and brought to life by the Amazons, not some pseudo-Jesus avatar sent by her heavenly father to defeat all evil and save mankind by the power of love. FFS, she floated cruciform in the sky as she struck down the Evil One.  

But nooooooo. We couldn't have a woman forged only by women smacking down a dude. That would have been too much in a film that already had a lot of women doing Stuff. So instead, she's capable of beating Ares by using the divine power that a male character gave to her, instead of being created by the Amazons alone. And it would have made so much sense for the Amazons to create her to be the best of them, the strongest, and the one who might be capable of defeating the only God they couldn't defeat.

Yes, I know in the comics some bloke re-wrote her backstory to have Zeus as her father, but I remember the early comics. Hers were the first ones I read after Tintin and Asterix. I remember falling head over heels for this woman made for women and by women, who was the most amazing character I had ever seen.

So yes, I'm still seething over the fact they sullied my Diana by having Captain Rapey McRaperson involved her in storyline at all, whether in the comics or in the film. Bleh in Zeus. He can go stick his knob in a toaster.