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#bad writing #bad science fiction #because that's all 'caught in the gravity well' means #scifi worldbuilding #salty sf writer #salty science fiction writer #salty scifi writer

mogwai-movie-house

Went to have a look at the implausibly high ratings for Nolan's "The Odyssey" over at IMDB, and found over and over again the hundreds of 9 and 10 star reviewers having only one (or occasionally two) reviews to their name:

which would seem to suggest there are bot-farms generating fake reviews to artificially inflate the score. Rotten Tomatoes, too, are apparently removing negative reviews, so we are back to the Captain Marvel days of manufacturing a fraudulent critical and public consensus for garbage movies.

fr3nstimu1ator

morgan5451

nonyayo2

Yes!

mister-merica

It's just you.......

Definitely

I wish my himbo problem child would learn some of these tricks when he keeps accidentally jumping in that small space next to the dryer (then hissing and biting when I try to awkwardly lift him out).

anywhoozles

tlaquetzqui

retired-extremely-dangerous

cluelesbo

This is really, really not something I want to hear from a man who's already fled from one terrible civil war in his life. Praying that he's wrong, and there's still a way to avoid that future.

ominous-signs

Found this randomly on a walk. I didn't see any sharp blades or anything anywhere so I'm???

ominous-signs

emmaubler

aardvarkingmad

My maternal grandfather was missing those fingers at about that spot ON BOTH HANDS. Some kind of farming accident, I believe.

I never knew my paternal grandfather. He was killed when my dad was 10 years old in...a farming accident. His tractor rolled over on him.

An uncle was missing his left arm above the elbow. Surprise! Not a farming accident. His car rolled over on his arm in a crash.

A neighbor down the street was a quadraplegic. He'd been a state trooper, and a prisoner in the back of his patrol car shot him in the back of the neck with a pistol they missed when they searched him.

Nobody ever had to tell ME life was dangerous. If I was a little less willing to climb that tree or jump that ditch or swing across that creek on a grapevine than the other kids...well, I had good reason. I KNEW I could get fucked up if things went wrong.

tlaquetzqui

I just have a Slavic mother. Our parenting method, as a people, consists largely of “Oh you want to do that even slightly dangerous thing? Have some horror stories.”

There is a reason Freud was able to get rich in eastern Central Europe.

ceasarslegion

Ouran high school was my favourite anime when I was like 14 which is really funny because thats also the age I basically was in a Haruhi fujioka situation. Not like fully literally but the meat of it was the same

I was the one single middle-class kid in a super high-end rich kid private academy with like pressed uniforms and building wings and everything. I didnt get any sort of scholarship, my dad just got a job as a teacher there and teachers kids got to enroll for free because the tuition was like 30 grand a year and you arent affording that on a teacher salary. So I understand her on a very visceral level and perhaps enjoyed OHSHC so much because she was SOOO me fr. These damn rich people

ceasarslegion

One time I convinced my classmates that I had never had sushi before because we were too poor to afford it just so they would pay for my sushi dinner and it worked. They were so out of touch that they thought I didnt have the money for anything more expensive than fast food. I did in fact take advantage of this partially because every teenager is a shithead and I was not exempt from that rule and partially because I knew they had more money than god so it was a totally victimless crime. A classmate once bought 2 copies of The Last Guardian on release just because they thought I "deserved a new game." They thought I couldnt afford a new video game and I said nothing

ceasarslegion

This experience also made me utterly immune to the "rich people shit is when [middle class thing]" discourse on this site. Because ive directly experienced rich people shit and its NOT when someone goes to NYU or gets Starbucks on their breaks at the job they have to work to afford their mortgage.

Rich people shit is when I had to yell at my classmates that we are not spending tens of thousands of dollars ON BALLOONS for our prom when we had a DJ to pay and their response to me was "thats only 700 dollars per person."

Rich people shit is when I went to go tutor one of my classmates little brothers who was struggling with history and it took him 10 minutes to go get his tablet from his bedroom and come back to the kitchen table because their house was that big, which was being cleaned by a live-in maid while their private chef made us snacks the entire time I was tutoring him. And then their parents paid me 500 bucks and told me "sorry I seem to have misplaced my other wallet, is this enough? Its not a lot :(("

Rich people shit is when the other teachers kids and I breezed through school with high GPAs because all of our peers had so much money that they never had to care about getting into a good university or having careers or budgeting or anything, so they never tried.

Rich people shit is when youre invited to a little get together on the weekends and get told to bring an overnight bag because their definition of a little get together is an overnight yacht trip. And then you get there and find out that your middle class definition of what's needed for an overnight trip is VERY different from a rich persons definition of the same thing: you have some pajamas, clean underwear, toothpaste, and some soap and face wash, maybe some moisturizer. They bring half their wardrobes and designer personally-commissioned serums that cost more than your house and then tell you that youre "just so quaint."

So much discourse around whos rich and whos not comes from people who have never been in a rich persons reality and so they end up shooting directly above them and calling that rich. But I tell you from personal experience that rich people are uniquely disconnected from reality and anybody who has to work for a living is by definition NOT rich. I dont care if they have a big suburban house and 2 new cars and go on vacations a lot, thats not RICH. Rich is when their kids think 700 dollars is pocket change for prom balloons and have their own personal yacht to take their friends on whenever they want, not when someone goes to fucking NYU.

thelegendofsqam

srsfunny

Thanks, I hate it.

yourtoradorasextendedwarranty

If you don't think that there was election fraud in the L.A. elections, consider this for a second. Have you ever in your life actually seen people in person in mass quantities that would be okay with their taxes going up? If your answer is no then there should be a deep investigation by the FBI into the L.A. elections. Because almost all of the in-person voters voted no to raising their sales taxes. And almost all of the early mail-in voting also said no to the raise in sales tax. Interestingly however more than 65% of the late ballots warford Nithya Ramen. Over 85% of the post election day ballots were in favor of raising the sales tax.

So. I think that it is very much worth looking into and prosecuting people where it's needed. Because I personally have met less than 10 people in my entire life who would be okay pay more in taxes. And every single one of those people make over $200,000 a year.

And for the record they raised sales taxes the city by around 10%. There is corruption in the state elections and in the city elections in California and it is so blatantly obvious. And yet liberals and Democrats will say don't check into anything. Because it's about power for them. Not about actual democracy or anything similar.

granmabarb

It’s all about the numbers. It’s figures on the daily news bulletins instilling the belief that whyte pepo are bad too ergo don’t target the actual ethnicities whom are the vast majority of arrests or you’re just a ray cyst 🙄

*nitter link below for those who can’t access the twatter. simply copy and paste to your preferred browser to watch the video and read the comments

https://nitter.net/ListedAsWhite/status/2077794417314791457

thewenchfromthewoods

They have been doing this with Hispanic criminals for decades. It's sick.

beardedmrbean

This section provides detailed information and statistics on Race. Find the latest news, publications, and other content.

____________________

You may get a separate line for White (Hispanic or Latino) and White (Not Hispanic or Latino) on other forms, but for the general classifications all they need to do is follow the guidance laid out by the fed, if they don't feel like putting extra effort into it at least.

cookingwithroxy

A supreme court ruling from 1915 is why this is a thing.

Also, people tend to forget that why Hispanic/Latinos are considered white is because of, yanno.

Most of south and central America being a SPANISH colony and the SPANISH colonizers intermarrying with the indigenous people they didn't murder as part of their whole Colonilaism.

Because as you might remember, there's this little european country called SPAIN. That had one of the most powerful Colonial Empires up until their fleet (the Spanish Armada) was defeated by England.

And before anyone says anything. Yes, I also am not happy of how we group things by 'race'. But I'm unhappy because 'race' isn't a functional detail to determine social norms, you're unhappy because you want to be racist towards people. We are not the same.

yourtoradorasextendedwarranty

So I should note this just because I'm pretty sure I understand what you're saying at the end. However there should be a caveat here even though you're technically not incorrect.

That caveat of which being no your ethnicity does not dictate what your social norms are by ethnicity alone. However, if you are raised within a certain culture and a certain country you're actions are likely going to be a result of the culture therefore the social norms of that location.

You know good well that I think racists are morons. And it's one of the bigger reasons I frequently call out the Democrats and liberals whenever they talk about Asians and Blacks. Oftentimes leaning extremely heavy in the stereotypes more times than not the negative what's mind you.

But I do think that it is worth mentioning that ethnicities and cultures do align pretty well together when a person is raised within their own ethnicities culture for a lengthy duration of time. That is not to say no one can be different. Because that's just factually untrue. But depending on the strength of those cultures you are likely to see those cultures within those people. That is not a biological thing. But it is a culture thing.

tlaquetzqui

The Spanish murdered basically nobody, and they killed fewer people in the New World than any other power except France, and France barely did anything over here. The Black Legend is the most notorious slander in human history and anyone who repeats it is a piss-ignorant bigot. (We already knew that about Roxy, of course.)

Also Mexico is in North America.

thydungeongal

I have posted before about how sometimes well-meaning attempts at running D&D without some of the more unfortunate dynamics can often backfire but in a way where most people don't even register it backfiring. Because when you take the step of "oh D&D's various 'evil humanoids' don't just exist in a vacuum and given the renfaire colonialism on display it's kind of impossible not to read them as somewhat racialized" many people will then go "okay but we still need some people who player characters should be allowed to kill guilt-free, so let's replace 'orcs' with 'bandits' because killing bad criminal people is perfectly ideologically neutral." At that point it's like "okay so your characters are no longer the racist kill squad, now they're just the Tough on Crime Vigilantes."

But I feel I should make clear that D&D the game itself is not exactly at fault here: like, okay, it is sort of at fault in the sense that it is a game of fantasy killing people with swords and magic. And it is easier for people to accept the killing with people with swords and magic part when they can imagine that their characters are at least to a degree justified. That is sort of just built into the game (and the game has built into its lore varying levels of making the fantasy of killing certain types of guy justifiable).

But D&D is not at fault for making people go "okay so it's bad when you kill orcs simply because they're orcs. It's better when you kill people who are bandits, who are a class of evil criminals where killing them is actually wholesome and sensible." Like, yeah, most people probably don't think about it that deeply, but the reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."

krongbly

I don't disagree with this post but I do think there's an important element being left out here which is that 9 times out of 10 players are engaging in combat primarily as a form of self defense. Most of the time it's less of "we can kill these people because they're criminals and that makes it ideologically neutral" and more "these NPCs are trying to kill us and the most effective way to stop them right now is to reduce their hit points to 0 which, if they fail their death saves, means they will die."

I think "vigilantes tough on crime" is actually kind of a bad descriptor for how most parties operate. This definitely varies wildly from table to table but I think for the *average* table there's honestly a solid chance that either your players are friends with at least one criminal NPC or even that they themselves are criminals. There's even an entire class who's fantasy is "criminal."

thydungeongal

I don't think the self defense point actually holds true in a meaningful sense.

In older editions of D&D, which were much clearer on the expected gameplay being "go into the dungeon and steal the stuff," there wasn't really this layer there. The rules for combat were generally quite harsh on player characters so combat was certainly something they didn't want to get into too casually, but ultimately the player characters were just going into the dang monsters' house and stealing their stuff. The monsters were arguably the ones acting in self-defense (but they're evil so who cares).

But in the WotC editions the self-defense justification is still fraught because modern D&D especially is an action game. It's a game where characters mostly have access to various methods of visiting violence upon their environs and where the gameplay itself rewards them for violence, because combat is the main source of experience as written in all WotC editions of the game and characters primarily grow in combat effectiveness.

The self-defense angle I feel is not supported by the game's rules itself, but is more of a narrative contrivance introduced by groups to make their characters feel more heroic.

My friend @tenleaguesbeneath once described it as, and I am paraphrasing, "characters hunting things for sport but the things attack them first so they can claim self-defense." Characters want to get into fights (because that's where the rewards are), characters primarily grow in terms of being able to get into cooler fights, but because getting into fights on purpose isn't heroic there's an angle of "those goblins started it" to make the characters feel more heroic.

I don't think this is a bad thing per se. It is one way to make the power fantasy of D&D feel less like the characters are violent thugs and more like heroes. But like it is basically a group of mercenaries going into a warzone, they can't really say "well we didn't really expect to have to kill anyone on our mission, but sadly, circumstances conspired against us." Fighting is what the game wants them to do and I don't think anyone is wrong for wanting to portray the player characters as engaging in self-defense, but it's only self-defense through a very crooked lens imo.

lumpout

Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.

The self defense/revenge motivation is a fig leaf for indulging in gleeful violence. While modern DnD fictionally positions the party as the righteous castle-doctrine empowered heroes; we should at the very least be critical of why it is doing that. It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?" Just because there's an in-universe reason as to why you get have to murder all those people in flashy and fun ways does not mean that it isn't what you (the player) sat down at the table to do.

jambeast

And the key thing to remember is that violence is awesome (in fiction) and we don't have to justify it to anyone.

brazenautomaton

Yeah this post is horseshit and the ideology behind it is soul poison. If you demand a Maoist struggle session for your D&D campaign for its ideological implications then 387.44 million miles of wafer-thin circuits is not enough to express the extent to which you need to go fuck yourself. The assumptions and demands you make are based in a concept of human experience that only exists to serve your politics. This is not how human beings engage with art, this is not how human beings engage with stories, this is not how human beings engage with games. You are suffering under this monstrous worldview and you are monstrous in attempting to inflict it on others.

You are not revealing a secret pro-vigilantism argument, you unfathomably vast stumblefuck. You are revealing that you have conditioned other people to be afraid of speaking up against you and they're unable to fight your openly malevolent bad-faith attacks, so when you threaten them with Unpersoning for some game mechanic or setting detail you don't understand, instead of standing up for themselves and telling you to fuck off they shuffle to the closest equivalent of it that they think won't get them yelled at.

thydungeongal

I'm sorry you feel that way. I personally enjoy playing D&D and thinking about stuff like this. :)

brazenautomaton

I'm sure you do. I'm sure this is so natural to you that it does not even register as a coherent or specific thing that you're doing. I'm sure you think this is just the way everyone looks at everything.

But if at any point in your entire life you ever, under any circumstances, believe yourself to have revealed something about someone's moral ideology based on how they engage with a game, you need to go fuck yourself inside-out.

thydungeongal

I'm sorry you've gotten that impression from my post but that couldn't be further from what I actually think. However, you seem like a genuinely unpleasant person so I don't think there's any point in keeping up this discussion for either of our sakes. :)

brazenautomaton

Did the following words come out of you yes or no:

The reason people don't think about it that deeply is ultimately ideological.

And the ideology is basically "it is bad to be racist but it's good to be a tough on crime vigilante."

cookingwithroxy

Unfortunately Brazen I think the simple factor here is that your vitriolic reaction gave OP an excuse to absolutely ignore the counterpoint being made.

The classic D&D part being a big example, considering the scenario is 'Dangerous creatures/violent criminals have nested in the (ruins of a fallen town/keep)/(local forest)/(nearby cave system) and are posing a constant and ongoing threat to everyone in the area. And you, as a hero, can gain renown/save people/profit off of dealing with them.'

The concept that everything there is harmless and safe and nobody is doing anything bad until the adventurers show up is a complete fabrication and I can absolutely say this and base this on the over 100 copies of Dragon Magazine I have sitting in a bin amongst the other things I have collected since my mother bought me the original Red Box set when I was NINE.

The need to define a world entirely and utterly divorced from our own by the standards of political theory that even on THIS world are actually rather questionable? Has nothing to do with 'issues in the text' and everything to do with 'if everything does not reflect my politics, my politics have no weight'.

But again, your vitreol si what OP is using to ignore this rather pointed fact.

siryouarebeingmocked

>Linking this to the modern "revenge porn" action movies like John Wick and Nobody.

In John Wick and Nobody, the revenge fantasy is presented as toxic and harmful to the people engaging in it, and those around them, and occasionally innocent bystanders.

Heck, the villain of the second Wick film uses avengance as an excuse to silence the guy he forced to kill his sister, and it backfires.

>It's functionally identical to the fantasy of "what would I do if a bunch of terrorists/bank robbers burst into the room?"

The stereotypical DND adventurer party are usually the aggressors, not the defenders.

You're stretching extremely far to draw a false equivalence to People You Dislike, without any actual criticism of either.

And I don't think you actually understand either group.

I don't think "how would I react if my life was under serious and immediate threat from assailants?" Says Anything™ about the people asking the question, despite your

yourtoradorasextendedwarranty

Sad reality of this entire post is the fact that DnD is a game meant for the purpose of escapism. What we have from OP is the classic, "If you play videogames and kill people in the game, you are probably actually a bad person. Therefore you need to reflect why you are a bad person and come to the right ideological views. Become enlightened just like me :D.

Thing is, and it will always piss me off, Brazens vitriol here is warranted. OP is the type of person that we in the nerd community call a tourist. A person that comes into a medium and tries to change HOW you are SUPPOSED to enjoy something, or just attempts to cry-bully their way into changing the medium itself. Which with DnD you have seen a lot of over the years. Nope it's not Evil Gods that corrupted beings, they are actually all sad humanoids that just didn't know any better. They are sympathetic you know. :)

Get the hell out of our hobbies. Seriously. Gatekeeping is a good thing and people like OP will always enforce that in me.

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