There's a time and place. I'm guilty of this too, a lot. Sometimes it's easy to get annoyed and just start screwing with someone, but it's often a lot better to just disengage. If you want the bear gone, kill the bear, trap the bear, drive the bear out, but for god's sake, don't just f#@%ing poke it.
I curse on rare occasion. Because of where I am from people think I should curse more, but I don't.
Got an email this morning from my mother telling me that my brother will be leaving the house when me and my girlfriend come over because he's not comfortable around me.
To be clear, he's very queer himself. It's not that. He just thinks I'm a bad person, or something. I don't know. We don't talk anymore. Didn't know it was this bad, though.
Already on the outs with my ex/roommate, who also seems to think I'm a bad person, so this really hit hard this morning.
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that really sux KC...I wish I had some clever advice or insight...but I just don't. Do something that brings you joy in the now and maybe someday try to talk to your brother about things. Sorry, it's all I got...
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What a drama jerk!
He can't suck it up and be civil for an afternoon and he also has to make your mom email you about it. Which makes him a coward as well as drama jerk.
That said, I've found the best way for dealing with b#%!$#+# like this is to just ignore it and take the higher road because you can't win fights with family and they usually aren't worth winning in the first place ("alright, I won! What's my reward?!" "My respect!" "So, no cash?!" "No, just respect!" "I sure could use some cash after all that").
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that really sux KC...I wish I had some clever advice or insight...but I just don't. Do something that brings you joy in the now and maybe someday try to talk to your brother about things. Sorry, it's all I got...
Well, except if killing your brother is what brings you joy. Don't do that. That would definitely qualify you as a less good person.
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Dammit, then I won't win the highscore!
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Really good therapy session. Very ouch. Much oof. But I think I know what to do now about my ex. I'll read her grievances, apologize as deeply and sincerely as I can, and then nicely tell her to get the f+%% out of my apartment because threatening to self-harm over my actions and then gaslighting me about whether that's what she meant when it clearly was and refusing to apologize for it until I apologize for what I did are all unbelievably not-okay red flags and I want her to actually get away from me for the next few months and maybe see if she can feel some remorse over them
gonna sleep on it first though lmao
I feel like she has a sense of "it's okay to abuse someone if they're being crappy to me" and she needs to flipping outgrow it on her own time.
I'll be sad later. For now I just feel nice about at least resolving one internal conflict.
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We're going with a non traditional Thanksgiving, in that I just realized tomorrow is Thanksgiving today.
In fairness, I remembered it a couple of weeks ago but dismissed it as a couple of weeks away and promptly forgot about it in my push to finish ALL THE JOBS at work before it snows.
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I am so stupidly oversensitive to conflict lately that I nearly recoiled from two people being jokingly mad at me over saying that rolls and biscuits were basically the same thing. :P
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All I know is that tomorrow we're having a newly traditional homemade meatloaf made from premium ground beef and Italian-seasoned sausage -- we started doing it about four years ago when we discovered that certain odious family members would look for Thanksgiving elsewhere if we weren't doing the 'traditional turkey/stuffing/etc' thing, and it's kind of stuck since -- it's a hella lot less cleanup than turkey.
Not sure if we're doing rolls or biscuits, and I intend to 'self-isolate' in my room as much as possible to avoid contaminating the family with any further lingering psychic radiation from the retail cesspit.
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I never trust anyone that does not like meatloaf, unless they are veg or vegan...otherwise...
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Meatloaf is okay.
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I never trust anyone that does not like meatloaf, unless they are veg or vegan...otherwise...
I never trust a meatloaf.
But then I grew up down the road from where Ed Gein lived so I have an excuse for never trusting a meatloaf.
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I used to think Meatloaf (the meal, versus the performer) was 'okay' and sometimes 'awful' depending on how it was cooked.
In the past few years, after some experimentation, it's gotten to 'pretty good'.
I wouldn't trust most restaurants to do it any sort of justice, and frozen premade are right out.
This isn't a great Thanksgiving for me.
I actually like Thanksgiving a lot. I like all holidays. But getting "exiled" from the main Thanksgiving so my brother can shut me out, the ongoing fight with my ex, and the resultant chaos meaning we had basically crappy tv dinners tonight are really souring things. I can't even fully look forward to the Thanksgiving this Saturday, because it's going to be stained with the whole context of why I'm there two days later--not to mention the question of, "Am I getting a second-rate feast compared to my brother's?"
Oh, and it's extra unpleasant because my ex went to her gf's family tonight. So not only was she not here to help with our dinner, she ate really well. She got to have a nice Thanksgiving, and she doesn't even like the holidays.
It's actually really weird to be sad in a normal way, and not an apocalyptic one.
If it's any consolation, you were spared at least some of the drama having to deal with all the bovine feces that typically fountains forth at such gatherings?
We don't do big gatherings. It would be just me, my girlfriend, and my folks. And my younger brother, of course.
Honestly, it's night and day how much faster I'm processing crises lately. Hasn't been like this for a while.
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Tis true, especially as most would include onions. XP
...I like onions in my meatloaf...
This isn't a great Thanksgiving for me.
I actually like Thanksgiving a lot. I like all holidays. But getting "exiled" from the main Thanksgiving so my brother can shut me out, the ongoing fight with my ex, and the resultant chaos meaning we had basically crappy tv dinners tonight are really souring things. I can't even fully look forward to the Thanksgiving this Saturday, because it's going to be stained with the whole context of why I'm there two days later--not to mention the question of, "Am I getting a second-rate feast compared to my brother's?"
Oh, and it's extra unpleasant because my ex went to her gf's family tonight. So not only was she not here to help with our dinner, she ate really well. She got to have a nice Thanksgiving, and she doesn't even like the holidays.
I'm really sorry this has been a rough one for you
Honestly, it's night and day how much faster I'm processing crises lately. Hasn't been like this for a while.
Are you like...THROUGH it, or just kinda navigating it?
Navigating it.
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Navigating it.
Which is better than shutting down and unable to deal with anything. Navigation is still progress.
Yeah, it's better. I've been effectively out of estradiol for a month, though, and that's not great. Forcing myself to cook dinner tonight because nobody else really wants to.
I'm just kind of sad and tired. I had a lot of energy earlier and was pretty upbeat, but now I feel only vaguely capable of doing things. The feeling will pass quickly.
I really need to start that "come up with a monster/encounter based on this Wombo Dream" thread.
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Feeling decent tonight. I know I spam this thread a lot, but honestly, I'm just glad I'm finally keeping a journal. Watched Fellowship of the Ring. Genuinely a beautiful movie. I wish more fantasy movies and shows focused more on that kind of sweetness and fun and sincerity. The entire first half of the first season of the Witcher didn't capture half the warmth and care of a single scene in Bag End.
I made dinner tonight and baked a pumpkin rum cheesecake, despite really being too tired for either. Now I'm tired. Night-night!
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Watched Fellowship of the Ring. Genuinely a beautiful movie.
Best of the three IMO! (not that the other two were bad)
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You know, the "evil races" argument continues to bug me. I really feel like people noticed that the "everyone of this humanoid race is evil" trope was really often tied to racist tropes and assumed that the "evil race" trope was itself a problem. It feels, like... hyperliteral. Like CinemaSins, but for well-meaning progressives.
We have tons of examples of "everyone of this species is evil" that I don't think these people would criticize. The cats of Maus are probably the most iconic example. Demons and undead in basically any setting get a free pass because they're "supernatural", but that makes zero sense, because the orcs in Lord of the Rings are literally just tortured elves and (in the movies) are actually clawed out of the muck, and the handling of orcs still managed to be racist as hell in those movies. And why are evil races bad, but races with built-in personality types aren't? Why aren't quiet homebody halflings and booze-it-up Chaotic elves still a problem? And what about all the stories about redeemed vampires and demons? Clearly them being "supernaturally evil" isn't some constant. It's not being applied consistently.
I feel like this is a drum I constantly bang on, and it's not my drum to bang on to begin with, but it just... people take fantasy so literally sometimes, and they're acting like all fantasy has to be from the same super-logical place.
The whole point of fantasy (and sci-fi) is the immense potential for absurd situations to be treated as serious, and the ideas of "intelligent monsters" and "mythical-beings-who-all-act-alike" are present in every society. Demons and fairies and vampires and orcs and elves really aren't that different. They mean what we write them to mean.
And, I mean, if you code them as a minority group and make them evil, yeah, that's a problem. But the problem isn't that you're employing the trope of "fantasy creatures who all act like one thing".
I feel like this is a hill I'll die one someday, but the only actual difference between Tolkien's balrog and Tolkien's orc is that the balrog is being coded as an embodiment of sin and corruption and the orc is being coded as a racial minority. You don't have to write them that way! It's made up! It can mean whatever you write it to mean! Sometimes it's a metaphor, and trying to literally assume "okay, so interpreting the wolves as a racial group" just betrays a completely lazy media analysis.
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For me, at least, the problem is less "all of this race are evil" and more "we can do whatever we feel is necessary regardless of alignment because we are facing evil". I am trying to refine evil Alignments for my own campaign setting, but that's taking a while. I also am a big fan of showing the alignment possibilities for a specific monster in order, or using the words "often", "usually", or "sometimes" before listing the alignment.
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Yeah, I can see that. I think there's also a difference between "these creatures tend towards evil" and "these creatures are monsters, and are evil incarnate". The latter group tend to be really firm metaphors for inherently violent concepts and beliefs--fiends and dragons are especially obvious with their moral lessons, like "don't be greedy" or "don't value bureaucratic thoroughness above the lives of human beings".
I think that a narrative where violence is always justified for demons or bugbears can work--creatures which are very much always going to try to kill you, which are firmly embedded as embodiments of evil, where the GM isn't going to try to introduce "oh, but the bugbear babies!" conundrums. If the hobgoblins represent Spanish conquistadors, they aren't representing a racial group so much as an ideology/military cause. Killing a hobgoblin, in that story, with that framing, is always going to be self-defense, in the same way punching a Nazi is always, to some extent, self-defense.
We don't mourn the aliens' deaths in War of the Worlds because we know they represent British imperialism, which is, you know, a bad thing that deserves to die. But they don't literally represent British people.
That said, I am a big fan of alignments being more nuanced when that's the intention. I portray bugbears as pure evil things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, but hobgoblins, on the other hand, I like to represent as a more nuanced representation of self-destructive evil. Showing mercy to a hobgoblin is, again, like showing mercy to someone with an evil ideology. It's an attempt at redeeming a bad person.
Redeeming demons and bugbears can also be interesting, provided you play within the original metaphors. Demons aren't a racial group who are genetically evil. They're embodiments of elemental sin. A demon's redemption arc will look a lot more like an externalized representation of how we all sometimes feel incapable of being good. Being a good person is hard, and if a demon represents pure sin, their challenge will be even more compelling. A bugbear's redemption arc might read similarly, or it might read like a metaphor for learning to see other people as, well, people--a journey every one of us had to make at a very young age, so again, we'll relate to the bugbear to some extent.
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All this animal talk has inspired me to bust out Bunnies and Burrows for the holidays.
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Yeah, agreed, thejeff. I think, if you really want to switch to a more nuanced story, you can do that--but you have to go all the way. You have to consciously switch metaphors.
A really good example of how not to do it, aside from Redwall, was in The Adventure Zone, a podcast in which the GM tried to get "bugbears are brutal killers" to jibe with his otherwise very cosmopolitan, "nah, monsters are just, like, weird-looking dudes" setting. The result? "Bugbears are just, like, weird-looking dudes, but they have a species-wide mental illness that needs to be involuntarily subdued through mind control."
As an aside, the one thing I really appreciate about Tolkien's orcs was that a lot of them genuinely did not want to be there. Very few of Sauron's servants were really happy to go to war; they were just shoved into this conflict and, hey, they do hate elves and Numenoreans, so sure, but enough of them wanted out that desertion was a real problem. A Saruman-type "I don't like Sauron, but better to be on the winning side" mentality pervaded Sauron's servants and allies. I wish Tolkien had leaned more into that aspect.
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While on this topic
Okay, to hit on other racial 'coding' -- a personal favorite race of mine are kobolds.
Kobolds COULD be viewed as 'always evil', but they can also be a horrible analogy of 'uppity' folks of different colors of skin that have come together in 'neighborhood watches' or even coded enclaves of different philosophies/backgrounds who prep the heck out of their defenses.
If we tie in the dog-like horri-bad versions from some RPGs, it gets even worse.
They know their strength is in their numbers and in working together (even if they don't particularly care for others in their community), so it could also be a chain of Kobolds = Communism/Socialism = Evil/Bad.
I think ideally it'd be easier to have (similar to what Freehold mentioned above) what a given community's alignment breakdown is, or hint at it in general -- a significant chunk of any sentient race is NOT going to raise too much of a stink if their leaders keep the community fed, well-defended, and potentially prospering/growing.
We see this in modern society all the time.
t does not mean that the baker down the street is Evil, but that the baker has accepted the societal constraints of a given society because they get left alone while they make food, for example.
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Kobolds COULD be viewed as 'always evil', but they can also be a horrible analogy of 'uppity' folks of different colors of skin that have come together in 'neighborhood watches' or even coded enclaves of different philosophies/backgrounds who prep the heck out of their defenses.
Both are options. Both work very well for different kinds of stories, if I'm understanding you. You mean, as in, racist suburbanites? That's what I think when I hear "neighborhood watches". I've rarely seen kobolds discriminating against other kobolds, for the record, scale color or no--just against non-kobolds.
They know their strength is in their numbers and in working together (even if they don't particularly care for others in their community), so it could also be a chain of Kobolds = Communism/Socialism = Evil/Bad.
This can work, too. I do it a lot in my work with kobolds, and I'm a socialist. I think every socialist should be at least a little fascinated by the attempts at socialism that have failed in the past, both due to their own errors and due to outside aggression. I think it's pretty curious how pro-capitalism people always seem very reluctant to do the same for their own system. If we don't identify how evil ideologies might co-opt our ideas for society, how can we ever hope to put our ideas into practice?
I think ideally it'd be easier to have (similar to what Freehold mentioned above) what a given community's alignment breakdown is, or hint at it in general -- a significant chunk of any sentient race is NOT going to raise too much of a stink if their leaders keep the community fed, well-defended, and potentially prospering/growing.
I wouldn't call this an ideal. It's one type of approach to a setting--one that fusses a little more about keeping things on the more realistic end of things. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. It sort of sacrifices a lot of fantasy's power to tell simple, stylized fables, is my problem. I do love Eberron, but it's not superior to other approaches. In fact, I think it may be just as prone to racist missteps as any other. It's just a different kind of fantasy.
Something I find very funny about George R.R. Martin nitpicking Tolkien--"So what happens to the orcs now that Aragorn's king? Is it time for ethnic cleansing?"--is that his own setting has, well, not only some widely criticized racist elements, but an entire species of creatures that are "pure evil" and need to be wiped out. The Walkers are evil because undead are evil because he tells us they're evil (because they represent the horrors of an endless winter). Huh, weird, it's almost like fantasy tends to benefit from creating mythical creatures who can be stand-ins for more complicated concepts.
I think my read was more that the orcs didn't want to go to war because war is a meat grinder for everyone involved.
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Huh, weird, it's almost like fantasy tends to benefit from creating mythical creatures who can be stand-ins for more complicated concepts.
As long as it keeps moving away from and we make it easy to map those mythical creature stand-ins to real-life cultures.
I think my read was more that the orcs didn't want to go to war because war is a meat grinder for everyone involved.
I read it as being some of column A and some of column B. Sauron drives his orcs with the whip to the major battles (and we see the whips in the book, not just in the obligatory ultimate evil marching song), including some who are explicitly unenthusiastic, but then again Gorbag and Shagrat seem rather nostalgic about the prospect of freelance raiding.
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And then we get into how the Rohirrim seem to savor bloody battle just as much, and it's all very funny.
But yeah, I think that "let's not code our always-this-one-thing species with harmful stereotypes about a real marginalized identity" should be a very low bar for everyone other than that one bad YA writer in the UK.
In the interests of maintaining the journal: overwhelmed and depressed. Two weeks of doing my best and nothing's getting better.
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Two weeks later, made up with the roommate. Thank gosh. It's not all fixed, but we don't like fighting and I think we both worked out better strategies for the future. It's a lot of tension eased. I was getting so overwhelmed.
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So, I had this idea that while I write/work/draw, I'll run a stream with chill ambient sound/hollydays music and a yule log/similar visuals. Anyone who wants to join can feel free! Think of it like a sort of virtual cafe. I've missed the NaNoWriMo coffeeshop write-ins, and it's nice to write socially. Helps keep everyone accountable.
I'm actually probably about to go to bed, so tonight's stream won't last long. But I'll be starting these in mornings/evenings!
Yeah. Not always a yule log, though. Currently I'm watching it snow over a lake. I'm just going to stream general winter-themed ambiance during my worktimes, and if other people want to join and work as well, that's cool.
Bedtime.
Things aren't going great. My workload is so high I don't really see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore. Which sucks, because last September I'd finally managed to catch up. And then things happened. And now I'm right back where I started.