Ninety-Three

As someone who digs the hell out of math, I still found the gameplay boring and empty of strategic decisions (though I spent a long time designing various parties). You get into many fights per rest, so the 1/rest powers don't come up often, the 1/fight powers don't tend to be interesting (the vast majority of them having the optimal strategy of "use as soon as situation permits"), and after that you're down to just issuing attack orders then watching your party trade basic attacks with the badguys until someone falls over. The only "strategy" I employed was a strategy for mitigating the impact of the godawful pathfinding (that pathing was so bad, I still feel the need to harp on it).

That playlist is extremely helpful and I'm going through it, thanks for doing the curation I was too lazy to do.

I read those articles, and I felt like a lot of their content seemed to consist of a bunch of different phrasings of the same core idea which goes roughly as follows "White people get to do stuff black people don't get to do because of societal double standards, I wish they'd stop benefiting from double standards". Not "I wish the double standards would go away", but "I wish people would stop taking actions that lead to the double standards benefiting them". There was also a consistent theme of "This double standard is super shitty and white people with afros are allowing it to continue", but white people with undercuts are also allowing it to continue. Today I ate a sandwich and that allowed racism to continue. Every action that isn't actively addressing racism allows racism to continue, so it's absurd to use that as a criticism. I think my fundamental disagreement is that I believe benefiting from double standards isn't bad (it's perpetuating them that's bad), and I don't believe that merely benefiting from a double standard inherently perpetuates the standard. If a white person walks to work, they're benefiting from a double standard where they're less likely to get hassled on the sidewalk than a black person is. Is a white person harming black people by walking to work? If not, what's the difference between that and a white person with an afro? In what way does the afro harm people that the walk to work doesn't?

While they certainly have similarities, I'm not sure those similarities are useful or worth remarking upon as anything other than a curiosity. I think the fact that All Lives is a reaction to Black Lives Matter makes it a fundamentally different thing than Kill All Men. Kill All Men is a joke that some people think accidentally turned out kind of offensive, while All Lives Matter is first and foremost a failure to understand the point of Black Lives Matter. Kill All Men bothers people because you didn't think through the implications of the joke, All Lives bothers people because it indicates you're missing the point of Black Lives Matter. With All Lives, you had Black Lives the idea put in front of you, and you still didn't get it, that's different in important ways from simply failing to consider.

That video spends a bunch of time defining cultural appropriation, but only the last thirty seconds or so seem to discuss how it's harmful: Cultural appropriation perpetuates stereotypes, stereotypes are harmful. It doesn't establish how cultural appropriation perpetuates stereotypes though. It implies that dressing up in a sacred headdress promotes stereotypes, and while I can see how it's disrespectful to native traditions (and bad for that reason), I don't see any kind of stereotype there. To go to a specific example from earlier in this thread, what stereotype is being perpetuated by a white person with an afro?

I am reminded of this:

See-double-you.

How does one keep up to date on a topic like Ferguson? I don't live in the US so my media isn't full of updates about it, I've taken to just Googling "Ferguson" under the assumption that if there were any significant developments since yesterday, the news results will be full of it. It's not an especially thorough approach, can anyone suggest something better?

I'm not contradicting that white people can't speak for black people, but this is hinting at a common attitude that I'd like to discuss. I don't think you can be offended on behalf of anyone but yourself (you can perhaps say "I know Bob and personal experience tells me he too would be offended", but that's not the sort of thing I'm talking about). If a black person can be offended on behalf of black people in general, what happens when another black person comes in and says "On behalf of black people, I am not offended"? By allowing multiple people to speak for those other than themselves, you create a contradiction, and the only way to resolve it is to declare "anyone being offended on behalf of the group supersedes anyone being unoffended on behalf of the group" (or contrariwise that unoffended supersedes offended) .

But at that point what you're describing isn't harming anyone, it's just benefiting from a double standard. And of course, it's shitty and racist that the double standard exists, and those who perpetuate it are racist, but it's not racist to benefit from a double standard. If it were, it would be racist for white people to commute to work unhassled, because they're benefiting from the double standard that black people do get hassled. I see that you don't like specifics, but I don't understand how anyone is harmed by cultural appropriation, and the only way I can think of to determine whether or not any action is harmful is to drill down until you have a chain of cause-and-effect that establishes "I do X, which causes Y, which causes Z, which causes A, and A diminishes Alice's quality of life", and it's very difficult to do that on a macro scale. It doesn't bother to me to be considered culturally appropriating because I've never been told that I'm doing it (literally never!). It bothers me that it seems inconsistent because I am an insufferable pedant who is bothered by everything that seems inconsistent. So cultural appropriation is bad and shouldn't be done because it diminishes the quality of life of a group with a history of being oppressed. But shitty tattoos are okay because the people whose quality of life you're diminishing haven't been universally discriminated against?

So, white people do dreads badly, which lowers society's estimation of all people with dreads, which lowers the quality of life for all people with dreads? Why does that only apply to culture and not, well, everything? "Doing [X] badly lowers society's estimation of [X], thus harming all people who [X]" sounds universal. To take a random example, tattoos. Should I not get a shitty tattoo because it will lower society's estimation of tattoos and thus harm all people who have tattoos?

This is something that really bothers me. People talking about cultural appropriation have this weird tendency to make minorities into homogenous monoliths: "Dreads are part of Black Culture" they say, as if all black people are the same. Dreads come from specific cultures, many black people have no more connection to those cultures than white people do, but no one has ever accused a black person of appropriating dreads. I'm not sure I have anywhere to go with this idea, but I'd like to add it to the discussion.

Yes, I read that. I saw a description of why white people dreads didn't really work. What I didn't see was a description of how that led to diminished quality of life for black people, which is what I was asking about.

Wow have there been a lot of posts today. I would've joined the discussion earlier, but I was at work. Jumping right in: This is the core part of cultural appropriation that I don't get. To take a specific example, how does a white person getting dreadlocks hurt black people? In what way is any black person's quality of life diminished by what a white person does with their hair?

It's a show that's absolutely not interested in character development. I don't consider that a flaw, I view the show as mostly a delivery mechanism for funny stuff and the occasional clever idea like Mr. Meseeks. S2E2 spoiler proving my point about character development:

I finished playing Chapter 4, and I have a bunch of things to say. Some of them are complaining about the game's flaws, some are (I like to think) interesting analysis, and almost all are spoilery. The party scene felt very stressful to me, and I find that surprising, because I know intellectually that between the combination of rewind and a linear narrative, I can't fuck up. If I failed, it wasn't going to be my fault, it would be a scripted unavoidable event, and yet I was still stressed out by the narrative stakes. I suppose if a linear narrative movie can make you feel stressed about its stakes, then there's no reason a linear narrative game can't, it's just never happened to me before (I generally think "games as movies" is garbage). Good job Dontnod.

I quit Guild of Dungeoneering. The gameplay is just too brainless, and while it's asking you to make decisions fairly frequently, they're all trivially easy decisions. There's usually an objectively correct card to play, and it's always really easy to figure out what that card is. I make maybe one real decision per minute, and spending the rest of the time making trivial deductions about the best card to play is awfully dull.

I think that's an unfair and terrible comparison. The response says Sanders is doing well but not perfectly. The problem those people have with the disruption of the Sanders speech is not "It was done well but could have been done perfectly", it seems to be largely "It was done terribly and should have not been done at all". You're making it look like this is a double standard when it's absolutely not. Also, who are these people abandoning support of imperfect black people? I have seen a lot of angry internet talk about the Sanders disruption, and no one has given any indication that they're withdrawing support for black rights because these few people did something the speaker disliked. Even those saying the protesters made the movement look bad were mostly lamenting it.

Before Gamergate, I have vague memories of Social Justice Warrior being used primarily as a sincere term of self-identification (and not from the kind of out-there radicals megaspel mentioned). Am I imagining that? Was it actually in use as a term to label radicals?

Ah, I had been assuming you meant the police as in the collection of humans who wear uniforms, not the police as in the organization (analogously: the distinction between "politicians" and "the government"). Objection withdrawn, the organization does a bunch of crazy things.

Ah, so you are angry at the notion of police barricades. In that case I see your point and the anger is reasonable. Actually discussing the validity of barricades as a police tactic is a huge, expertise-requiring topic that I have no wish to get into here. I fundamentally disagree with this. Assuming any human being acts reasonably is a good, maybe the only good, place to enter into a discussion of how to interpret their actions. Everyone's actions seem reasonable to themselves. How many productive analyses come from starting at "So they're completely unreasonable"? It's an attitude that leads to dismissal, not attempts to understand.

I think there is a line they crossed which made it unreasonable to be angry that they got arrested. That line is the barricade they climbed over. If their plan was to stage a legal protest with the expectation of an unjust police crackdown which would arrest them, I see your point: they expected to get arrested and it sucks that they did. In that case it's reasonable to get angry because one is angry at the crackdown. But these people went out and deliberately crossed a barricade, then refused to leave. If you're angry that the police arrested people deliberately breaking the law, what do you want? The police not to arrest them? Unless you're angry at the very notion of police-enforced barricades (which is a valid opinion I totally accept, I'm just assuming you're not because it seems unlikely), I don't understand what there is to be angry about.

Same computer, same drivers, same install, same everything, worked fine when I played two weeks ago. ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series.

I was going to post about the Bernie Sanders interruption in the Race thread yesterday, but I was afraid of getting told to stuff my facts-contradicting-the-mood and leave. Now that it's come up: Bernie Sanders has in fact, actively spoken on the movement and upon police militarization. It feels like they're working on the same principle that PETA uses a lot these days: There's no such thing as bad publicity. They had to know this would make people angry at them, to have gone ahead and done it anyway that must have either been their goal, or at least an accepted cost of doing business.

I'm having a really hard time seeing this as anything other than "Your (sourced, factual) correction contradicts the prevailing sentiment of this thread, please leave." I thought that, this being an important issue, people should be informed about significant details like the one I posted. I guess I'll leave if this is a thread where relevant facts are unwelcome, but I'd like to think that's not true.