Sententia

To be honest I haven't come across this tone issue you're pointing out. I don't think I've really seen it anywhere, including this thread.

In regards to tone, as jokey as it was gormongous' quote "I'd be a proponent of civil rights if only they didn't make it sound like everyone who disagreed with them was a racist." seems almost perfectly applicable. It's hard to call a certain environment patriarchal without insinuating that the environment is patriarchal. In the end feminists are going to say a bunch of things about how bad it is to not be a feminist, because ultimately a feminist is just someone who holds women in equal regard. And if you're not a feminist you are without exception contributing to the problem, this is not an issue with a middle ground.

As a physicalist I have to reject the concept of a 'person' that you have. You are your consciousness, and you have been ever since the physical basis for your consciousness, your brain, developed enough in the womb. You've been a consistent being through your entire life and you will continue to be the same being until your brain stops functioning, regardless of how much it changes in its capacities or biases, as it has since you were a baby and as it will continue to do. It's really impossible to lay a blanket answer on 'is change bad?', it's going to depend wholly on circumstance. My advice is this: the two most important aspects to consider are what you enjoy most in life, and what you want to accomplish. Give those the highest weight even if you're feeling depressed about your prospects in the now; finding meaning is very uplifting.

You could prominently feature LGBT support, like a bracelet or rainbow profile image. Even though allies and bi people wear them too it sort of takes care of some level of insecurity.

I agree with everything else you said except this. Of course you can use logic to decide it! Just because it's a more complex and more personalized situation doesn't mean it's illogical or for some reason fundamentally different from any other difficult problem. You can examine the reasons a person feels certain things, and if they have legitimate concerns you can change your behaviour. In your example of the funeral I honestly think the vast majority of people are more concerned with volume than specifically what you say. If you stub your toe and swear under your breath I don't see anything at all wrong with it, but if you stub your toe and say "owie!" loudly that's much more undesirable. Basically I don't think putting the situation in the context of a funeral changes anything relevant to whether swearing is permissible. People who dislike swearing don't dislike it more or less at a funeral, it's just that volume takes a considerably higher value.

I don't know if I'd state it as 'people have a right to be offended', but rather that we should recognize that the mental state of being offended is a physical emotion that people have and it may be uncomfortable to them, and we should take that into consideration. I don't think fuck is a word that should be offensive to anyone because I don't think there's a legitimate, non-stupid reason for it, so I don't mind making people uncomfortable by using it casually. In my view they're the ones who need to get used to it or correct whatever's happening on their end to make them uncomfortable, and not me who needs to change my speaking habit. There are other words like bitch that have even a small chance of having a legitimate objection to and I have no problem dropping. The definition of offended seems a bit confused thus far. It looks like we have slightly misaligned definitions, so I'll make mine clear: it's an emotional response that one has as an unconscious reaction. It might be anger, disgust, fear, something like PTSD for victims maybe, it's the umbrella term for your negative emotional reaction. It can have other applications, for example if a smell is offensive it would be a negative olfactory reaction, but here we're applying it to emotions.

The reset ones are actually completely simplistic once you reach the endgame. If you can manage the highest reset one you get all the ones below it as well. What I actually like about this more than candy box is that it's a much better game to play. The ultimate endgame nececitates having the three golden cookie upgrades, whereby optimally you'll play it by having it open in a tiny, golden-cookie-sized browser window and click on it every time it spawns for a maybe 4-8x higher CpS than your base. Every time you soft reset you gain a permanent prestige multiplier to CpS based on total cookies baked, and that carries through all soft resets. It ends up being a math toy, a fun distraction while you're listening to a podcast or watching esports (for me anyways ) where the numbers go infinitely up and up as you increase your prestige multiplier. Plus every time you reset you get that satisfaction of utterly wrecking the start and mid-game even faster than the last time you did. All that said I don't know if I'd enjoy this as a monetized product. Certainly making it F2P with payments for things would defeat the purpose (as does cheating), and I don't know how I'd think of it if I had paid money up front, I might feel impelled to treat it as the main focus.

Thank you both looking back it seems a bit self-congratulatory, I meant it as a sort of honest mental release though. My life's changed faster in the past year or two than the 18 before.

I tend not to post here even though a lot has been happening, not sure why. This might have one of the largest impacts in my life though, so I think it's appropriate! Ever since elementary school all the way through middle and high school I had a severe rejection of homework. The source of it was childish, simply an aversion to increasing my workload, though at the time I occaisonally attempted to rationalize it or just wallowed in guilt. In the meanwhile though I was mostly capable of getting As, Bs, or Cs without doing any homework off the back of test scores. I was able to do this and pass all my classes in elementary and middle school but in high school I started failing a few, it was simply not feasible to get a D or better with only test scores, and I ended up being half a credit short of graduating. By the way if you're wondering what I spent all that free time on: I was on the varsity tennis team, the robotics team, took a martial arts class and a fencing class, and I organized the weekly parties with my other nerd friends where we'd play games and eat pizza all night and into the next day. Anyways, back to the story: at the time I wanted to enjoy as much of summer as I could with my friends, so I hid my failure to graduate from my dad (mom and dad had gotten divorced by then, and she wasn't mentally together enough to really talk to me). In that time he kept wanting me to move out and get a job and I have a real problem saying no to my dad, I have so much love and respect for him. When he finally found out he just wanted me to move out even more and take an online class to finish graduation, both of which I did. When I moved to the city I really thought it would be a chance to change my behaviour, but in the end nothing changed. I lazed around for 9 months, and during that time I watched an enormous amount of pro SC2, but also spent an enormous amount of time considering philosophy, studying aspects of biology, neurology, sociology, math and programming, physics, downloaded interesting books off piratebay, I learned more about space and rural farming and all sorts of things. Looking back it was like a self-inflicted college crash course. Still I just didn't want to work, I didn't want to give up my free time for no benefit. I'm an extremely unambitious person, there's never really been a difficult dream or goal to achieve, I only want to do the things I like doing: competitive sports, competitive gaming, learning about the world, eating food, reading trashy crime novels... I actually really love a lot of activities in life so eventually that money ran out (it wasn't a huge amount in the first place, I spend frugally) and I chose to move in with my mom, dad having moved to detroit with his then girlfriend, now wife. Then began my life in Kenosha, where I am now. When I started living with my mom she wanted to build the basement into a livable space to rent it out, so she enlisted my help as I have construction experience from Kentucky, the unspoken agreement being my free labor as payment instead of rent until I got a job. To be clear I'm not a lazy or poor worker: when I have a job I want to do it gets done quickly and effectively. I still avoided looking for work while deceiving others into thinking I was. Around ~6 months after the move though I happened across something that applied the sharp, attractive clarity of philosophical writing styles to the reality of the world and how we should act; I found ethics! I then searched out and educated myself on the scope of problems in the world, both natural and man-made, and what I learned eventually led me to decide to completely change the route of my life. Which leads to the mental state I'm in now: many of the issues in the world already have organizations matched against them whose goal is to fix them. The simple fact is because I live in such a wealthy nation my dollars can go very far in the poorest parts of the world, which is why I'm going to give every drop of my extra income away. I don't need money anyways, I don't drink or smoke or buy drugs, my pleasures are all cheap, my taste in food is cheap, I don't own a car and plan to never do so, and I don't care to own a house. My life and habits are perfectly suited to become a vehicle for philanthropy without even being to the detriment to my happiness! And so I've found the motivation to begin my working life versus my historical sedentary nature: the difference is not what changes in my life, it's what changes in others' lives. If I imagine an alternate future where I continue to do the bare minimum and get by with as much free time as possible, I see someone else having whatever job I would have and them spending the money on stupid excess that I never would, instead of good causes. I recently took the pledge and set up donations to Against Malaria and Water, though I don't plan on fully giving everything until I've paid off college and created an emergency fund for myself. There are other changes, I'm now a vegetarian to combat animal mistreatment, I've begun voting at every opportunity, I've become a bit more confrontational about religion (going from ignoring or deflecting all conversations about religion to arguing my case for atheism). In conclusion, the lessons to draw: dabble in philosophy? Fuck I don't know, think about shit. Then do things. Bam.

Sure it's pretty funny as a joke, but the reason it's so awesome is because it's also serious.

SO means Significant Other, because straight women exist so we can't keep saying girlfriends, and I can say SO or partner to mean my boyfriend.

this one is from a couple years ago but still gets me -

I swear I'm not watching this thread like a hawk, I just happened to get back from class two minutes ago I don't think Mike is being insincere, my issue with the apology is not about sincerity and really neither is anyone else's here. We're not saying his words are false, we're saying he's using the wrong words. The overwhelming focus of the article is regretting having caused such an outcry, making people angry at him and PAX and PA, rather than what it should have been which is "sorry I caused this damage to people, I didn't realize it was harmful and now I do". I don't consider it a poor article, it's a nice gesture to make, but it doesn't denote Mike as a now truly learned man. I don't hold PAX or PA accountable for Mike's actions. Anecdotal evidence seems to differ a fair amount as to whether PAX is a hospitable environment for women, but certainly PA has spent plenty of strips criticizing how games portray women, how women are treated poorly by gamers, etc.

You're actually completely wrong in that judgement of me. Before the first mention of it in this thread I basically didn't know anything about Mike. I've seen the 4th panel episodes and the Strip Search season, but those just portray him and Jerry as a pretty funny pair. I had no idea about Mike's ongoing fuck-ups, but after reviewing this situation I came to my conclusion. History had no sway for me because I never came across it before. Sorry if you edited it before I posted, on my screen I didn't see it until I had already made the second edit to my own post edit: to be clear I'm not committing to an exhaustive assault on Mike's character it's just that he does thoughtless and hurtful things when provoked, which is a pretty common trait, but being common doesn't mean it's acceptable. Especially for a guy who has so much influence on how others act.

Language is important twig. The fact that he used those words provides a window into his belief, subconsciously or deliberately. This might not be the case if english were his second language or he wrote this under extremely time-limited circumstances, but we can safely assume that is not the case. The logical follow-through juvenal is making is not "he wrote the bad thing > he shouldn't write the bad thing" it's "he wrote the bad thing > he's thinking the bad thing" edit 2: I realize it might be frightening to apply such a powerful meaning to the language you might throw around seemingly carelessly on a daily basis, that you might suddenly be judged for making some small mistake in your writing. It can also be seen as a very comforting generalization because if you're a very morally fully thought-out person your language will automatically click into being correct without you having to worry about it, and if you're not and your language betrays your prejudice, you can look back at what you've written and use it to find your own biases to better yourself.

The tenor of the article is Mike is most worried about the negativity he sees directed at himself, PA, and PAX. He loves PAX and PA and doesn't want them damaged. It isn't about how he's realized the damage rape culture causes, it's about how there was this uproar that needed to be taken care of, and pulling the merch made the uproar worse, implying outright stating not pulling it would've been preferable. Why in the world would he possibly regret pulling the merch if he understood why it was bad? The fact is he hasn't grown from this as far as I can tell from what he's said, he's just learned to not do the behaviour that brings the sharp pitchforks. Which is why he's going to fuck up and do something shitty in the future, because he has a fundamental misunderstanding.

You might also read Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

I was wracking my brain to try and understand zeus' witty metaphor and completely forgot that Mass is a religious ritual

The Kickstarter details look like they were written as a parody of Uwe Boll If you're seriously considering throwing 500 bucks into a pile and setting it on fire, why not give it to Oxfam or Water instead?

I still feel like he's responding to the negativity directed at him, not to the fact of his actions damaging people's lives. I believed every word though.

Boycotting isn't antithetical to spreading understanding about these issues. Both can be done, and either way some positive progress is being made. The reason I think it's good to be open about boycotting isn't solely because it's a capitalist version of punishment, it's also a powerful social statement which engenders discussions like this one to crop up.

That's absurd hermie, PA don't gain great benefit from Child's Play as far as I know. I don't donate to it anyways as it's not the most effective organization to put my money in to increase world awesome, but in regard to this issue it would be silly to boycott it for that reason specifically.

Ultimately the most convincing argument for people to hear, at least it was to me, is not about respect or having the correct attitude towards women, it's a one-two of the fact of our current situation and the physical real-world effects words have. Certain crimes are committed against women with sickening regularity, certain career paths are severely more difficult for a woman to follow, and these are just first-world issues. If you took the whole of living humanity, the situation of the average human woman is grossly abused and powerless relative to a man. I think most people are able to see the truth in this as it's demonstrably the case. The second argument is harder for people to understand but just as logically proven in my opinion, which is that speech has tangible effects on how people treat one another. The difficulty is getting both of these concepts across in a way that's broadly understandable, even to the people who are most set in their ways. It's also hard to get this message spread to people who aren't listening for it.

I started from the same place they did in the stream of course, and my first Lord spent his life uniting Ireland and then fabricating claims and invading on the few counties who refused vassalization. He died ultimately having fully conquered Ireland and two counties at the closest edge of Scotland. The second Lord, my current mans, is the greatest god damn conqueror of all time. He swiftly and soundly defeated Scotland without suffering a single loss, declared war on Norway and blitzed them to gain the five or six counties they had in the middle of Scotland, then vassalized or fabricated claims on the remaining counties until it was fully in his control, waited for them to recover from being conquered and then easily crushed an already war-torn England and Whales in quick succession, or simultaneously, he's kind of forgotten in his old age. His time since has been spent planning where to strike next, and carefully manipulating the succession laws and taking out problem heirs so that his grandson can inherit all four kingdoms. Unfortunately in his laser-focus on marshal victory he'd carelessly thrown about control of the various counties and duchies to random vassals since he was beloved by all of them, so when his grandson does inherit he'll have a revolution on his hands because everyone wants some other county or dutchy and therefore hates him. I didn't have expectations about how the combat would be since Chris and Nick militarily mostly flopped about incompetently, but it's actually a sort of fascinating system. Most of my experience in strategy games comes from starcraft 2 where the battles tend to be close, but in CK2 it's actually optimal to only pick fights you can win by a devastating margin, to the point that I've never lost a single battle. I guess it's really the difference between a 1v1 strategy game and a massive one. Micro-managing all the marriages is not my thing though. I just click the button that says "sure I'll marry you!" and when they whine about it again in a few years I click the one that automatically pairs them with someone, though at one point I noticed I was marrying one of my granddaughters to one of my grandsons and shrugged a little bit as I hit accept. Educating children is totally my thing though. Gotta make sure my future vassals are capable.

Haha no, I'm quite poor and not really worried about it now. It's been a while and it hasn't fallen off or molded over yet, so enh. The reason I've been gone so long is I don't have internet at home and haven't for the last couple years ever since I moved here. I recently got a couple more construction jobs in addition to being basically manager of a lemonade and local produce cart, so there's been literally one day of the week I have enough free hours in the afternoon to bike the 30 minutes to my college and do stuff online, and I end up doing more important things or playing SC2 with the leftover time.