I’m neither a fan or a hater of the character Gina played in the Madalorian, but it seems mighty sexist to fire her for overwrought comparisons to the Holocaust when Pedro Pascal also made overwrought comparisons to the Holocaust.

However, despite not being a follower of Gina I doubt I’ll keep Disney+ around, as it’s almost guaranteed that the Mandolorian is now going to be managed through a partisan/hyper-ideological political lense. Star Wars for me will only be the original trilogy, Rogue One and the first two seasons of the Mandalorian. Sometimes you have to realize that an IP has for all practical purposes “run out of gas”, and continued patronage just encourages the owners of the IP to continue to churn out trash. I’ve done the same with Star Trek (couldn’t make it past mid-season of Discovery, foolishly gave Picard a chance and thoroughly disappointed with the season 1 ending), and the butchery Disney is considering with a Firefly reboot (Inara going to be some kind of instructor/social worker instead of a courtier) convinces me that it’s better to realize early on when an IP has soured and move on to something else. Marvel Universe overall (some movies were always going to be not great, I’m talking about the whole setting) is probably reaching a similar point. I think the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie is the only one I’m looking forward to, and they’ll probably fire Chris Pratt before too long.

Their violence is speech, our speech is violence.

In other words, they can act out to the point where buildings burn and people die and it's 'protected', but if we utter any words against it, we are 'literally murdering' them.

Quote from: Brad on February 24, 2021, 03:01:04 PM

Wtf is "Holdoing"? Also, I thought we weren't supposed to assume anyone's gender, or does that only apply when it won't benefit them? Like I will be nicer to chicks, but it's bad to be nicer to chicks unless they are getting free drinks, even though I'm a terrible person for assuming they want a free drink or that they're female, but I had better buy them that drink lest I be an asshole.

And then modern Western women wonder why they're dying alone with their cats...

It's doing a heckin' sexism by criticising TBP moderator Qweens (:pray:) because something, something, toxic masculinity means those who're identified as women receive more 'blowback on moderator decisions'.

The term probably refers to when people were critical of Holdo in The Last Jedi, but the pushback against that from the Usual Suspects came in the form of "you just can't tolerate a Strong Woman(tm) in a position of authority!" rather than because both her leadership strategy and actions were genuinely terrible.

This, pretty much. What surprises me is that they opted to call it 'Holdo-ing' since the character in question really wasn't particularly competent (I've heard comparisons to the infamous Steiner 'social generals' from Battletech. Fairly apt, in my opinion).

But yeah, they consider any criticism of their oh-so-fragile fem moderators as 'Holdo-ing'. How dare you! (spoken in snotty Swedish accent)

The only way you can question a mod call is to email their general gmail account... which may get read, eventually. No guarantees they'll get back to you.

EDIT: Because I didn't want to double-post, but check this out.

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/how-does-an-appeal-work.877744/

My favorite: "Each user page has a Warnings tab that is visible only to that user and to the mods. A lot of our posters fret about this, and worry that it is some kind of "permanent record," or that past a certain point our bar for moderating or banning a poster gets lower.

But that is emphatically not true, and I advise you not to think of it that way. It's not a "scoreboard" (to use your term); it only provides context. Generally speaking, we weigh recent history much more heavily than the past, and most of all we look for patterns to inform our moderation."

This seems weirdly contradictory. Or is it just me?

This game is turning out to be another Fable.

It's just flat out boring to me. It is able to stagger on because there's a dearth of cyberpunk games out there. I also found the "choose your own genitals" to be quite jarring at the start of the game. If you're going to do that, you don't have to have a floppy dick appear.

The whole character customizer is completely pointless, since:

(a) there's no third person view option
(b) your character doesn't show a reflection, even in surfaces where NPCs are showing a reflection
(c) some if not all of the cutscenes don't show your character either
(d) none of it matters anyways in-game.

My opinion is that nothing is going to fix 2077. They could patch every bug, but the core gameplay issues remain.

There are a number of excellent videos illustrating the frankly jarring disconnect between what was promised versus what was delivered. Open world and AI behavior; interacting with NPCs; combat and upgrades; vehicles and safehouses... etcetera.

One of my personal favorites is how in Red Dead Redemption 2, you can walk around and pick up items for later purchase right off the shelves, or browse an in-game catalogue. In CP2077, it's a last gen basic bitch open a window and buy shit interaction.

Frankly, Disney seems to be going out of their way to piss off anyone who's to the political right of Mao.

The worst you can say about Carano's tweet was that it was hyperbolic. It was hardly offensive. But the woketards have been after her ever since she refused to play the pronoun game.

Quote from: Shasarak on February 19, 2021, 03:11:57 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on February 19, 2021, 08:53:07 AM

Aren’t D&D zombies ripped mostly right out of voodoo anyway? They fit the dictionary definition to a T: “a corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in certain African and Caribbean religions.”

You for one should recognise the differences between a DnD Zombie and a Voodoo Zombie.

It depends on what lore you’re working with. The beliefs are not exactly readily shared. Bokors apparently steal the souls of people and place them in jars to create zombies. Salt breaks the spell. Some anthropologists tried to claim that real zombies were created using pufferfish venom, though the veracity of this is disputed.

D&D necromancers appear to be able to animate any corpses they find. Whether this enslaves the soul of the deceased is never explained AFAIK.

It’s a square peg in a round hole situation for sure. Zombies having their souls consciously enslaved is definitely a lot more horrifying than the corpses being soulless puppets.

Nope. In the case of a zombie, it's basically flesh puppeted with necromantic energy. A galvanized corpse. The soul has nothing to do with it (and I recall at least one adventure where an annoyed spirit asks an adventuring party to dispose of his shambling corpse so that it won't hurt anyone).

There are undead along the vein of 'enslaved or mutilated souls', typically evil incorporeal undead, as well as some oddities (like the bodak). But zombies? Nope.

Imagine voting for this guy unironically while simultaneously claiming Trump was mentally unfit for office...

Remember they were unironically declaring how 'we voted a dictator out of office' after the election.

Setting aside the whole cheating question, you don't get to vote dictators out. That's kind of the point of being a dictator; you ensure the people can't remove you through peaceful transfer of power, usually by way of 'roll the tanks!'.

My guess is when Biden finally collapses into drooling idiocy, Harris will declare a national emergency and suspend elections 'for the duration'.

I think the mods are trying to make the users terrified of not knowing where the boundaries are by giving vague guidance on some issues, and eliminating posts deemed offensive so that one cannot see what the tripwire for a ban was. Having the rules in a constant state of being hard to comprehend is an old tool of establishing an environment of terror to instill discipline. One eventually stops initiating any action not explicitly endorsed or managed by the leadership cadre. God help you if you wind up associated with a faction of the leadership that finds itself disfavored.

Unsurprising. Such is the nature of any kind of despotic system.