Hannibull Rektor's page

After finally fixing the issue with my cache, I chose to browse the recruitment page and found something interesting: almost everyone GMing a game has an alias specifically for being a gamemaster.

My question is this: is there some sort of benefit, direct or otherwise, from having it? Or is it just a cosmetic thing?

Just curious since there is only about a week left for my Darkest Dungeon recruitment.

Has anyone seen the theory about Preston Garvey being the real mastermind behind all the raiders in Fallout 4? It's a spoof obviously, but it actually makes a small bit of sense: pretend that he is out for the good of the Commonwealth, send raiders to make him profit, and, when their usefulness runs out, send the General after them. Best of all, his dupe never knows any different, because who would suspect that the shining do-gooder who always rats out raiders is actually a criminal mastermind?

*hands Garbage-Tier Waifu the succucookie* Stay out of trouble!

Is it bad to have had my speech patterns compared to Dr. Borous in real life. "In playing GOD, we have CREATED A MONSTER!" I love how overly dramatic he is.

It is actually possible to go back and say, "Hey, I did not know that word really meant that." without continuing to use the word. People just had an anyeurism because the word was said in the first place despite being in an innocent context and he was trying to explain his take on what the word meant.

People calling you appellations like "Hitler", "fascist", or "bigot" usually prompt a desire to explain that you are not, in fact, a racist and did not know whatever you did was truly racist/whatever. That's part of the very natural human desire to try and calm down a volatile situation and exonerate oneself of any perceived social misalignment.

To not allow a person to explain that they meant something else when the context made it clear that they did not intend whatever they said as racist is just toxic behavior. People have a right to defend their intentions when people are intent on metaphorically raking them over the coals. It is not defending the word itself as much as their innocence as to what the word meant to others.

A measured approach is necessary to not come off as an ***hole, histrionic, preachy, etc. People who make mistakes react far better to honest discourse meant to correct said behavior instead of wild accusations and terrible false parallels born from a kneejerk reaction. There is, after all, a person on the other end of the screen and it pays to remember that not everyone knows what you know.

In my opinion, people getting irrational about someone making an honest mistake like that is almost as bad as if someone intentionally made a racist remark. Both are born from a closed mind and an unwillingness to view the world through any lens other than one's own.

EDIT: Seeing the new posts that cropped up while I posted this one, Miss Price has a wonderful way of handling it that matches the point I am making here. It benefits no one going off about unintentional misuse of words or acting on false information. Sane, reasonable discourse can often make a person see far more then name-calling, shaming, or banning can.

I must say, an intrigue-based adventure path would be interesting.

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"

If you recognize that reference, here's a succubus-shaped cookie.

If a Paladin slips in Grease, does he still fall? *a single clink in the bad pun jar*

Someone shouting racial slurs at you is an entirely different thing than someone obviously misusing a word in a potentially-offensive context. If someone shouts racial slurs at you, they probably mean it offensively. As I stated above, context it key.

Rysky, the guy in my example did not know anything about the word beyond the fact that it is used extensively today to refer to that nomadic lifestyle. It's not common parlance even in the usage he used it in. Not everyone is aware of every trigger word for every individual group. That's why, instead of jumping into a full-on flame war over stuff like that, it is best to just simply mention that certain groups may find it offensive and offer evidence as to why.

To offer an example of how far that can go if we consider word misuse or other, unintentionally offsensitive things to be actually racism, consider this hypothetical scenario. Someone from Europe calls me a cracker as some sort of strange cultural joke. Being from Europe, they don't understand the fact that it is a slur when spoken to a white person here in America because, in Europe, it actually means something else. Would it be right or fair for me to then say that they are actually an evil racist and that they need to be banned? If not, why is it different? Intent is everything in these sorts of scenarios.

To the reply about my friend, saying that he was just trying to have an excuse to be racist, that is quite disingenuous. He was simply responding that he did not know that the word itself had any racial connotations and that he was not using it in that context. He ended up getting banned simply because he was trying to relate why he used the word after the thread blew up with the typical internet insults of 'you must literally be Hitler to say that' and accusations that he was secretly some dumb, uneducated redneck that spent his days wearing a pillow case on his head.

Regarding my personal anecdote about Romani not knowing or caring about the word, I have never heard anything about it before that incident. I have crawled internet forums for years and have even had the displeasure of being on 4chan for quite some time and I never heard of it being used as a racial slur before my friend was the subject of that witch hunt. In my experience, if you cannot find it some way on a website like 4chan used as an insult, then it must not be widely known.

Indeed, that incident is one of the reasons why I left GiantitP years ago. A hyperaggressive community willing to grill someone for something that was completely unintentional and mods willing to ban the person for simply stating that's not how they meant it is not a community that I can honestly get behind. That, thankfully, doesn't seem to be the case here, but if it ever becomes as such, I will excuse myself from it.

Such behavior is almost as toxic to a community as actual trolling, because it pares down communities into cliques where everyone needs to know every single thing and never make any sort of social faux pax. It creates a gated community of sorts. It kills off constructive dialogue rather than helping facilitate it.

There are plenty of people who mean nothing racist at all when they use words like the example that I stated earlier. Taking a standoffish attitude with them as a kneejerk reaction does nothing to help them realize their words may have been offensive. As a matter of fact, it just cements the idea in their head that it must not be a big deal if the only people that it could possibly offend fly into histrionics over it.

All that said, I will leave this thread with this one piece of advice: try to understand people's motivations behind saying certain things instead of automatically assuming that they racist ***holes. Try to internalize that, at some point, you have made some sort of mistake of your own, a mistake that no one had any right denigrating you as a person over. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

A squamous mass of eye-studded tentacles that silently shriek blasphemies towards all living things as it moves in a reality 3 dimensions too small to accommodate it. The beast's lair is there and not there, a crumbling palace in the space between song and silence filled with radiant, everblooming darkness. In other words, a Great Old One!

Based on the forum rules, people should just flag and move on. Railing against racist posts is, at least from my understanding of the website rules from about two weeks ago, against the general forum rules. Flagging racists posts is not, in my estimation, silently supporting them. It's a more efficient way of undermining them, one that keeps the drama down to a minimum. All calling people out on the internet does when you have a 'flag post' option is just facilitate an argument.

This isn't even addressing what each individual person defines as racism. While I think we can all agree that saying 'all of X race are bad people/criminals/genetically inferior/whatever' is racism, there are some definite grey areas and more personalized (And sometimes ridiculous,) interpretations about racism.

I know at the college I used to go to, it was considered a racist microaggression that could get you suspended if you asked where someone was from, because it supposedly disenfranchised minorities from lower income neighborhoods.

So, before saying that all racist posters need to be banned, you need to consider the implications of that. In my aforementioned college experience, nearly anything can be considered racist if we take into account microaggressions or things that people are not even conscious of that they say.

To use an example, I remember a situation on GiantitP where a person once used the term 'g***y' (Censoring in case of sensitive people,) to refer to the Vistani character he played and their lifestyle. Now, to most people, that is not even remotely racist. It refers to a certain type of nomadic lifestyle, often replete with mysticism and romantic notions. Many people nowadays view it as being a positive term, something synonymous with a Bohemian lifestyle. Someone took offense at the word because of the word's origins in being a slang term for the Romani people in the 1600s, something that many actual Romani nowadays neither know nor care about. The poster ended up getting banned despite not using the word offensively. Someone just read way too much into what he said and took offense with it. I knew the guy pretty well. He didn't have a racist bone in his body. He just, like most people, did not know about the word's origins and did not consider that it could even remotely be racist. When confronted with hyperaggressive people about it, he tried to defend his position and was banned.

Using the above example, saying that racist posters need to be banned is a slippery slope to get on. Nearly anything can be interpreted as racist if you scrutinize it too much. I remember a controversial blog a while back about Paizo itself being racist because 'oh they just had to put talking monkeys into the Not-Africa continent, the dirty racists'.

See my point on why banning anyone saying remotely racist is problematic? You should look at the intent people are posting with, not just say 'hey, it's racist to me, so ban them'. I am not sure what thread prompted this thread, so I can't say for sure whether it was, in my opinion, a ban-worthy instance, but it's important to realize that not everyone who says racist things are cross-burning, sieg heiling bigots. Some people are just misinformed or possibly are not the most delicate people at wording things.

RAW is keeping me from having a necromancer served by a dapper undead butler. IT MUST BE PURGED!

Totally not the best butler ever.

If keeping the soul from moving on past a mortal lifetime is evil, why are alchemists with that wonderful elixir of immortality or wizards with the Immortality discovery not evil? Those may only affect the self, but how is it different?

If it is specifically the souls of others, a strange distinction to make in universal law, why not then make Trap the Soul an evil spell? It explicitly keeps the entire soul from moving on, whereas Animate Dead only uses small fragments left behind in the body that seem to be going nowhere.

Why not petrification effects? Those keep the subject in a limbo between life and death until they are cured, assuming they ever are. Pretty sure eternity as a statue is denying Pharasma her due of the mortal in question.

In a setting where even demon lords can be redeemed and many believe there is a moral imperative to not wipe out goblin babies because reasons, why is it that taking a hunk of fallow flesh and making it useful is so bad? Why is it that you can enslave minds, bind outsiders and keep them from their duties until Groetus goes all Majora's Mask on everyone, and burn people to death, but you can't use a teensie piece of semi-soulstuff that is doing nothing else and that is not actually part of the soul that moves on to the afterlife to animate a corpse? How is animating undead bringing more negative energy into the world by dint of creating mindless puppets any worse than the gods themselves choosing to 'punish' murderers by giving them immortality and greatly enhanced prowess to continue their sprees?

'Big Grey Goddess Says So' is not a logical answer. It makes Pharasma look hypocritical to allow gods to punish mortals by keeping their souls in eternal torment on Golarion, but not allowing mortals to simply harvest the remains of someone whose soul has already passed on for a constructive purpose.

Pathfinder is not alone in making claims of 'undead are icky, so let's drum up reasons why they are evil and flag them accordingly'. As much as I like The Elder Scrolls, creating undead is considered evil there as well. That doesn't make the base argument any more reasonable, however. It is, thankfully, kept in the purview of mortal perception of morality, as opposed to hard moral truths in The Elder Scrolls universe.

As Delightful states above, BigNorseWolf, they both cross a threshold of idiocy that makes them both unworthy of a vote. What you are saying makes about as much sense as the Republican concept of voting for Trump because they believed Hillary Clinton was worse. Were you okay with that logic during the campaign trail? If not, then why is it different here? Double standards are a dangerous thing to start applying to logical arguments. A bad candidate is still a bad candidate, no matter what degree. Reinforcing the notion that these candidates are worthy of a vote is just basically saying 'give me more bad candidates'.

You also took a reductionist approach to all of the things Hillary Clinton has said over the years in your comparison. You may not agree with the interpretations of what she has said, but you cannot deny that there is a bit more than her just making some inaccurate, slightly racist statements about economics.

In the end, this is the type of thinking that is causing problems. One cannot say 'let's fix this because' without getting a kneejerk reaction of 'you must be illogical/Hitler/a lizard person out to destroy the fabric of society'.

Why is it so difficult to admit that maybe we did some things wrong? That maybe we need to unify more as a party? Or that we need to actually have a better strategy than 'oh that guy is ___, don't vote for him'?

In the end, digging yourself into an ideological trench changes nothing. It may be the easy route, because it keeps the human ego intact, but is it the right way to go about things? Are we more worried about feeling better about making questionable choices or about resolving to make better ones down the road?

In the end, this conversation is a microcosm of what is going wrong in our party. We would rather bicker and argue with each other than work towards something better. We would rather sit on our lofty, imaginary thrones and say that everyone that does not believe as we do are illogical, immoral deplorables than try to honestly sway them to our side. And, worst of all, we would rather embrace intellectual dishonesty rather than examine our own double standards and methodology that our detractors use against us. And yes, we do have double standards in our party. Republicans do as well, but for all we bash them for hypocrisy, we do it too.

Not meaning to sound rude, but wasn't this thread about discussing the future of the Democratic Party? I feel things have gotten just a bit derailed, honestly.

There's nothing constructive about complaining about an immutable fact, as in who is president, when it would be more prudent to look towards the future and figure out how next election cycle is not a repeat of the last. That was, I think, the point of this thread, right?

If people want to vent about Trump and company, it should probably be on a separate thread. I was interested in seeing some groundbreaking hypotheses, but found much less than I imagined to due the venting. While I understand the sentiment, it's neither relevant to the thread's purpose, nor is it really different from the attitude that allowed Trump to win last time. You have to give people a reason to vote for you, not against someone else.

Quite honestly, Trump won not because of the usual claims of 'Trump rallied all the bigots to his cause', which is more than a bit misleading, but because his opponent could not rally enough people to her cause. Many people thought she had a massive disconnect with the voter base because she would say things like 'the economy really isn't bad' and laying white guilt on thick. Trump, as much as I don't like to admit, at least acknowledged that a pretty sizeable portion of white people are poor as dirt too. Rather than also recognizing that, Clinton just began bashing Trump for 'saying minorities don't have it bar's, a false equivalency. Things like this caused many who would normally be in favor of a Democratic candidate simply not vote.

I myself did not vote at all in the election because neither candidate had a strong connection to reality, a sense of moral integrity, or a genuine plan that I could get behind. Before the accusation that people like me are simply part of the problem, such as I saw earlier in the thread, surface, let me just say that voting your conscience is not inherently wrong. It seems especially tone deaf when some of the same people were angry because no Republicans voted against Trump due to moral reasons. Saying you can't vote your conscience if your are a Democrat, but Republicans shouldn't have voted for Trump because of sexist jokes is just hypocritical.

Again, hope I didn't sound too rude, but I just feel that there is nothing to be gained from complaining about the current administration. Instead, people should start coming up with new, innovative strategies that would cause people to flock to their cause. Nothing is ever gained from crying over spilt milk.

I DID NOT DO ANYTHING WITH THAT DONKEY! It was actually a mule. GET YOUR CLASSIFICATION STRAIGHT!

The next poster secretly performs Pandaren-Gnome facesitting ERP on Moonguard.

In Pathfinder?

Shelyn... just Shelyn. Why? If you want my half-joking answer, I would ask if you have ever seen a picture of her. If you want my more serious answer, it is because she supports things I personally like: art, music, and beauty... and also because she is hot.

Sarenrae is a close second because I am all about redemption and healing up until evil needs it's face smashed in, just like she is. "I will bring you peace... but it's going to hurt."

Army of Darkness is considered bad? BLASPHEMY I SAY! *straps on arm chainsaw*

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Why It's Bad: It's super campy and has evil alien space clowns with ridiculous, clown-themed weaponry.

Why I Love It: It's super campy and has evil alien space clowns with ridiculous, clown-themed weaponry.

Enough said.

Somewhere, somehow, a paladin falls because this thread got to page two. :P