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  • i will do an intensity of seriousness

    i will also do an intensity of bliss

    i will even do an intensity madness

    but certainly not an intensity of arrogance
  • edited 2016-03-11 20:32:32
    So something that's a very consistent pattern about interactions on the internet is that you can't just object to things.

    You have to be stylish.

    For example:

    "I think that fat people aren't real people."

    If you simply say "No, that's just mean and wrong", then you're boring and people will just make fun of you.

    You gotta say something like "I think that people who think that fat people aren't real people aren't real people".

    That's basically showing that you know how to "play their game" and beat them at it.
  • "why are you still talking about [really old series that no one is talking about anymore]?"

    because i have things to say about it

    "why aren't you talking about [current series]?"

    because i don't have things to say about them, as i am not watching them
  • > The titular character, and your default avatar. In real life, Boshy is an I Wanna Be The Guy player who claimed IWBTG was too easy. This game was made (in part) to give him the finger.

    oh wow, so that's the (really silly) origin of the whole name.
  • that she could be an amazing dragon-girl right now, in her youth, but eventually she would be relegated to some lackluster receptionist desk job as an adult, this thought, about how the unspoken gender rules of society would screw her over, kept her up at night.
  • Would defying that require knocking some heads?
  • oh right there's that other character in that other setting
  • given the rest of the setting, is it really that hard to find nothing unusual about a shell-duck?
  • kinda interesting how i occasionally group together several anime series that I watch, at around the same time, or grouped because of their subject matter

    Stratos 4, Rocket Girls, Sky Girls are the first group.  Possibly with Stellvia added on.

    Then there was AKB0048, Lagrange, Symphogear.

    And then there was Arpeggio and Coppelion.

    Most recently there's been a chain of "people say this show sucks": Guilty Crown, Angel Beats, Beyond the Boundary.  This led straight into Yuuki Yuuna which doesn't fit this categorization but I might add Run=Dim to this.
  • Oh right, there was Fractale before Guilty Crown, too.
  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    Guilty Beats Beyond the Boundary is my new vaguely Yukari Yakumo- and definitely anime-inspired hip hop-Eurodance album.
  • housemate discovered an allegedly hilarious dorkily-animated thing called "Pokémon Rusty"

    i am disappointed that it has nothing to do with the Castlevania-clone game called Rusty
  • edited 2016-05-01 03:20:50
    i know i am not a mighty warrior

    because i regularly eat corn chips

    and corn chips are no place for a mighty warrior
  • Gretel
    Hansel
    Kaguya
    Aquell
    Lyra
    Dorothy

    why do those last two have to have less or more than six letters in their name
  • should Ramiel, as a boss, be more themed on being perfect or being a d8?
  • by theming it on a d8 i mean theming it on dice in general

    someone once made the neat observation that for something that has the 2D appearance of a hexagon you can draw lines to make it look like a d6, a d8, or a d20, or something like that

    there's a neat avatar-size gif illustrating this

    so basically he'd start the battle by rolling a d6, then upgrade gradually

    that would still be governed largely by randomness, so unless the random effects are sufficiently devastating, the battle could turn out to be very easy unexpectedly

    that's not perfection at all
  • wait, instead of having the boss do actions based on a die roll, how about having the boss do actions of self-preservation (e.g. moving to stay out of range) and offense (i.e. attacking you) and then have the BATTLEFIELD CONDITION decided by the die roll
  • wait, instead of having the boss do actions based on a die roll, how about having the boss do actions of self-preservation (e.g. moving to stay out of range) and offense (i.e. attacking you) and then have the BATTLEFIELD CONDITION decided by the die roll

    that's a really neat idea

    and then the boss could have abilities that are affected by battlefield condition, such as being healed by energy output from spots that are on fire or electrified

    or perhaps if you change your equipment to deal with the battlefield conditions, such as switching to gear that resists fire but is weak to water to deal with the field being on fire, it then uses a water ability to target you
  • perhaps its perfection is that it has something for every situation, and the challenge is that you need to have something for every situation that also deals with the fact that someone else is trying to exploit exactly that against you
  • I think I may have figured something out.

    Y'know how there's all those kids' shows that are kinda lame when we watch them as adults, because the themes feel sorta generic or cliche or whatever?

    The way we enjoyed them as kids isn't simply enjoying them "as is".  That's the mistake we make as adults.  We learn to see things "as they are" but as a result we lose the tendency to infuse our own desires onto things.  As a result, when we have a story that is unremarkably written, as adults, we see it as unremarkable, and fail to enjoy it.

    But as children, we didn't see them "as they were" -- we infused our own creative energy into the experience.  We brought the characters into our lives and thus they came alive for us.  We didn't see them as static plot devices that only ever did this and that action as specified in the canon of the story; we saw them as living beings that made decisions like the rest of us, right and wrong, and lived with the consequences.  We saw them as friends, companions, neighbors, with whom we could relate, and through whom we could understand the setting.  They, and thus their setting, became part of our lives.  We desired things for them.  We felt sad and upset when these friends of ours suffered.  We even felt betrayed and angry when they didn't do things the way we wanted them to.

    No matter how "cliche" the story, it was not "just a story", but a living, interactive context through our imagination and our relating it to our lives, so it was never "cliche" at all.  We were not gods who decided what would or wouldn't happen; we were participants who dealt with circumstances as they arose.

    The mistake we make as adults is to see ourselves as "outside" this context.  To see ourselves as gods, or god-like observers, with no investment in this context.  Given no investment in this context, the context become static to us.  It becomes simply a thing, sitting there, with no interactivity.  At most, there is an external design process of choosing story elements, from the perspective of a god of the setting and storywriting.  Thus, the only thing that can excite us at this point is if these elements, which we observe from our "god's perch", seem different from usual and bring us novelty value.  Unusual combinations of tropes, basically.  Otherwise, the static product seems similar to another static product.

    The result of this mistake is to allow the story to become a static product.  To stand outside it, rather than to become a participant in it, to become part of it.  Standing outside it means that it is idle amusement for us to observe; becoming part of it means that we feel the pains and pleasures of the journey that it takes us on.  Standing outside it means viewing and evaluating it as a dead, unchanging product; becoming part of it means that we develop our hope and fears and for what we want it to be, regardless of whether those hopes are fulfilled or dashed, or those fears avoided or realized.

    In short, standing outside of it means being bored by the static product while becoming part of it means letting it and our lives mix in their meanings and emotions.
  • there is certainly some benefit to being in a blank room with only one thing
  • edited 2016-05-01 10:36:06

    there is certainly some benefit to being in a blank room with only one thing

    there is nothing wrong with contemplation either
  • edited 2016-05-01 11:01:49
    strength
    nimbleness
    resilience
    smarts
    will
    socialability
  • is the tabletop roleplaying ruleset meant as a way to give some semblance of structure to imagination, or as a way to enable a person to do things 'ey can't normally do?

    i've found myself wondering if it's possible to run something entirely with "roll-playing" -- i.e. an entirely mechanically-driven experience, and while some people may find this boring, i feel that this does touch on a key piece of (at least what i conceive of as) the essence of the RPG -- that it enables us, as players, to do things through abstractions replacing the actions themselves

    like, what good is a high charisma score for your character if you can't roleplay properly? but what if you can abstract that away and simply say that your character attempts to make a case for something, and does so very convincingly even if you can't figure out how to word it?

    i think such an approach would probably horrify people who see tabletop RPGs as ways to give structure to their imaginations, but as someone who sucks at RPing, i think it could be interesting -- the idea of seeing the mechanics as tools and a campaign scenario as a problem to be solved using those tools
  • edited 2016-05-01 11:32:36
    why can't we use music as our avatar

    like not just music score staff with notes

    but, like, instead of seeing a picture, a piece of music is piped directly to your brain (so that it's not annoying)

    kinda like how a videogame or cell phone has different short tunes to indicate different purposes, these musical avatars could be used to indicate different people

    i want my avatar right now to be the first or second musical sentence of the yuuna yuuki is a hero OP

    i don't want it to actually be some specific visible thing from YuYuYu because i don't think any character or picturable feature represents how i feel right now, but i feel the music does
  • edited 2016-05-01 11:41:04
    using the mechanics as an extension of one's senses in order to learn about a setting
  • edited 2016-05-02 20:08:38
    i make an effort to refer to a human as a "person" rather than as their gender (e.g. "this guy", "that lady")

    i also make an effort to refer to anime series as "cartoons" or "series" rather than "anime"
  • edited 2016-05-03 05:03:49
    why does freedom planet have to feature gratuitous japanese on its title

    if anything it should feature gratuitous chinese, given that the setting has vaguely chinese-sounding names and chinese-mythology-inspired features

    as a result, i have covered up the japanese in the logo on the sticker i have on my laptop
  • okay, actually i just needed to find some place to stick it to something else because then i wouldn't have to spend the sticker itself by removing the backing
  • Since 2006 I've closely observed (at least "closely" for someone who doesn't get paid to do this) downballot elections in the United States, and I've noticed the phenomenon of parties not running candidates for various seats, leaving them uncontested even if the other party nominates Double Hitler or something.  This has, in fact, occasionally led to complete fucknuts in Congress and other legislative bodies.

    I had wondered why, for a long time.  I mean, it is rather plainly obvious, the one thing worse for one's electoral chances than a warm body is nobody at all.

    More recently though, I think an explanation is starting to bubble to the surface gradually: it costs a lot to run a campaign, even a placeholder one.

    Now, for a placeholder campaign, it's not that expensive financially.  If you're not expecting to win, but just expecting to stick around just in case the other party's nominee self-destructs and gives your team an opening, most of the time they won't and you can get by with maybe a few thousand dollars worth of campaigning just to show your party's supporters in the area that they're not completely forgotten, making a token effort on your part.

    But it's not just about the money.

    It's a time-consuming -- and sometimes soul-consuming -- process, to campaign for a seat.  To be the candidate upon whom all those expectations and demands for attention and desires for scrutiny fall.  You have to suddenly take about half a year out of your life, going door to door to event to event asking for people to support you, or at least hoping that people friendly to you show up so you can say hi to them.  And worst of all...you have to beg people for money.

    And this doesn't just apply to challengers.  This applies to incumbents.  Incumbents have to raise money just to defend their own seats.  Then the party also demands that they help raise money for the party.  And meanwhile they still have to look happy, kiss babies, talk to constituents like those constituents they talk to are the only people in their lives so they can give them their full attention, and so on and so forth.  Oh, and the money picture just got worse after the infamous Citizens United SCOTUS decision.

    This problem is probably doubly compounded these days for members of Congress.  Especially ones in the Republican majority who have to deal with the fact that on one hand they have to govern and keep the place running but on the other hand they have to appeal to an increasingly insane supporter base that just wants to break everything that their governing job stands for into millions of little tiny pieces.

    TL;DR running a campaign sucks and being an elected official quite possibly sucks more, depending.
  • It strikes me that when I read people's writing I read it in the best voice acting job (and in my native accent of course).

    But when people write weirdly then that basically means it's being spoken differently such as it sounding really lazy when people write run on sentences.
  • edited 2016-05-05 02:46:40
    https://transportevolved.com/2015/02/17/official-japan-now-electric-car-charging-spots-gas-stations/

    edit: i had another line here but it was some silly comment about anime that had nothing to do with the article (which is a really cool thing btw)
  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    I don't agree with how you've presented it but I like the core idea. That's pretty neat.
  • Crystal said:

    I don't agree with how you've presented it but I like the core idea. That's pretty neat.

    sorry, i was trying to find a snarky/humorous thing to add to it but couldn't think up anything better
  • Y'know, I'm fine with y'all's being interested in all sorts of nerdy stuff, like anime, videogames, etc. -- I am too.

    I just don't want it constantly showing up on my Twitter feed, or in my meatspace surroundings, etc..

    If it does, then it stops being the slice of life, and starts feeling like I'm eating piles of seasoning for breakfast.
  • edited 2016-05-06 05:17:29
    I think my perfect vacation would involve (1) me having nothing to worry about, (2) warm, sunny weather, with occasional bouts of rain, (3) during the day, learning about historical, cultural, natural, and economic features of a place, (4) during the night, having some time for gaming, and having some time for reflection, (5) extra free days, for reflection and creative engagement (e.g. writing and making music).
  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    What, not going up to seven? How could you GMH.

    That sounds incredibly pleasant, especially the second one.
  • I think if I ever made a game (or other visual medium) it'd probably end up structured a little like how they made Fantasia -- i.e. the action in the game would, to some extent, revolve around the music, rather than the other way around.

    Like, something that wouldn't happen, as long as I can help it, is the action ending too quickly to show off the important parts of the music track (speedrun tricks aside).
  • I think if I ever made a game (or other visual medium) it'd probably end up structured a little like how they made Fantasia -- i.e. the action in the game would, to some extent, revolve around the music, rather than the other way around.

    Like, something that wouldn't happen, as long as I can help it, is the action ending too quickly to show off the important parts of the music track (speedrun tricks aside).

    If it were a JRPG, random battles would almost certainly use the area theme.
  • i think i just realized that these tiny grey jumping insects that i've known since childhood are actually not fleas but springtails

    i never before thought to look this up but i finally did
  • That irritation when your browser says that it found a certain word, but you can't see where it is because it's nowhere on any space you can scroll to.
  • Sometimes I wonder if a popular western conception of anime is...noticeably un-Japanese.  Despite the ironic image of "weeaboos" constantly trying to "be" more Japanese or bring more of Japanese...anything into their lives.

    The issue is that there are a lot of people who see anime as basically a weirdness magnet, or the place to go to find craziness, and associate the loud and obnoxious and overacted and obssesive and tropey such with it.

    Perhaps that may be a valid association with some anime series, but if anything it's basically the opposite of the Japanese stereotype of being politely and poetically elegant.

    Now, I think some people have pointed to how anime is kinda part of the Japanese counterculture, so I guess this contrast could be consistent with this sort of thinking.

    But still, it's jarring to think of a concept like mono no aware on one hand and then see people being loud and fast-paced and having no interest at all in contemplative reflection.
  • edited 2016-05-07 07:22:21
    no memes are "dank"

    the only way they can be "dank" is if you make them wet

    a meme is a digital phenomenon and cannot be made wet

    Q.E.D.
  • edited 2016-05-07 07:22:49
    words that the internet misuses and should stop misusing:
    * dank
    * cancer
    * autism
    and others
  • i guess you could express "rebelliousness" by being anti-parents and pro-peers

    but you can also express "rebelliousness" by being anti-peers
  • when i first watched Titanic -- actually, the only time I watched Titanic -- i basically didn't understand the plot, beyond "Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet are the two main characters who love each other, but they can't be together because the ship sank and he died"

    the movie was not very interesting to me, as a result
  • I know Blake is a faunus but I still prefer pictures where this is hidden, because she'd prefer it that way.
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