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Mr. Maltose posted:A few loud obnoxious voices, like pretty much every noted OSR author except Kevin Crawford. And a couple more. I'd stick my neck out for Chris Kutalik, for example. The OSR has some damned good products but the people are real lovely and bad. I was hanging out in a nice OSR discord with pretty okay people and now that Google+ is shutting down suddenly Zak S and a bunch of other people showed up in there and it's like naaaah I'm gonna go now.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:55
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Mirthless posted:Can you really call out everyone around you who has problematic viewpoints? Every single person? I get what you mean, I really do. I don't disagree with you. But, personally, do you actually do that in your life? Every family member, every friend, people you know professionally? Like, some people in the OSR get flak for who they work for and what's up with that? What are your boss's political viewpoints? Can you police your co-workers? Professional peers? Yes, I do. I have fired people for having hateful viewpoints, gladly. I've made sure they'll never work in any senior capacity in the industry again. I have 0 friends who are racists or misogynists. I don't associate with anyone who is, and I call them out whenever I can. I have quit jobs because of misogyny and racism (I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I am headhunted, and being able to opt out and take a minimum wage to do charity work for a year - which also tied in with less hours for my cancer treatment). So, yes, you absolutely can, you can call it out, whether you want to take any consequences is another matter, and yes i'm able to do so, but you call it out, or you spend your time feeling bile because you didn't call it out. Edit: Your analogy to a job is a joke, this isn't a job, it's a hobby and who you spend your money on. EDIT: Your entire argument is that you don't want to call it out, because you don't want to think about it, but you also don't want to be criticised for defending it. You're wanting to eat your cake, and still have it. In short, if you're not calling out the alt-right in OSR and giving them money, then you're defending them, and you can take your lumps here and be criticised for supporting racist misogynists. You don't get to play the victim here and 'it's too hard', it's loving easy, this isn't your entire family we're telling you to sever. PST fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Oct 31, 2018 23:57
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Meinberg posted:You're right, I'm being overly simplistic. It's important to know what that strength and skill are being used for. If it's being used to slaughter hordes of orcs or subhumans, that's bad. If it's being used to topple authoritarian power structures, it's good. Cool, we're on the same page I think. I was a lit major in undergrad (and largely a medievalist) and I absolutely loathe giving up e.g. Arthurian legend or whatever to nazis. Which is also not to say that those stories are spotless to modern sensibilities by any means, but it's a different set of problems, particular to their time in history, and one I think it's interesting and productive to grapple with.
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Oct 31, 2018 23:59
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or poo poo, even Tolkien for that matter: taking Tolkien seriously as an influence should include his latter-day realization that he'd hosed up re: Orcs
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Nov 1, 2018 00:04
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Tolkien had an utter disdain for the Nazis appropriating Norse/Old Germanic culture on their time as well.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:11
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Plutonis posted:Tolkien had an utter disdain for the Nazis appropriating Norse/Old Germanic culture on their time as well. Yeah we can definitely talk about his systemic issues, but he was blatantly clear that he thought facists and nazis were utter shitheads, and took time to tell them via letter: http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/j-r-r-tolkien-snubs-a-german-publisher.html
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Nov 1, 2018 00:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:or poo poo, even Tolkien for that matter: taking Tolkien seriously as an influence should include his latter-day realization that he'd hosed up re: Orcs Can you point me to a document where he discusses this? I assume it's in one of his letters or something but I'm not sure where to start looking. Orcs, "humanoids," et al. as a veil over racist pulp tropes is a topic I've been yammering about with friends for a while but it'd be helpful to have a primary source that I can show people too. edit: PST, thank you, that's also something I'm interested in. fog boar fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 00:17
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We live in a capitalist hellworld and I am willing to accept that sometimes, especially with bosses and colleagues, you can't just tell them "Shut up you loving fascist bootlicker", although I have nothing but admiration for people who actually do that. But for the people in your hobby? You have no reason to be nice about that. What, are you afraid of being ostracized by them? By people who write about subhumans and who think women whould have -2 in Strength? Do you really need this kind of company?
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Nov 1, 2018 00:20
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fog boar posted:Can you point me to a document where he discusses this? I assume it's in one of his letters or something but I'm not sure where to start looking. Orcs, "humanoids," et al. as a veil over racist pulp tropes is a topic I've been yammering about with friends for a while but it'd be helpful to have a primary source that I can show people too. I sadly don't have a source on hand but I definitely recall reading about this; for Tolkien, it was a theological thing. Orcs were made by torturing Elves into twisted and broken forms, and he regretted that he had made them irredeemable and unsavable because this did not line up with his own religious views, and realized that he should have made a way for an Orc to not be forever damned by actions outside their own control.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:22
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edit: I'm just gonna stop, this is winding down and i don't need to keep it going. have a nice night everybody! Mirthless fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 00:26
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I found a quote from Letter 153:Tolkien posted:They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making — necessary to their actual existence — even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) The Tolkien thread in the Book Barn can probably quote better stuff about him regretting making a whole race of evil.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:39
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Mors Rattus posted:I sadly don't have a source on hand but I definitely recall reading about this; for Tolkien, it was a theological thing. Orcs were made by torturing Elves into twisted and broken forms, and he regretted that he had made them irredeemable and unsavable because this did not line up with his own religious views, and realized that he should have made a way for an Orc to not be forever damned by actions outside their own control. This lines up closely with the take on it that I came up with, that becoming an orc had to be a choice that was made uncoerced, by someone of sound mind. That way it's an explicit moral choice, so it's more akin to signing a contract with a devil. In the way that a contract can be rendered void or can be broken, being an orc was also something that could be undone. Lately I've come to doubt that there's any way to reclaim what I'm now more inclined to interpret as a racial caricature.
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Nov 1, 2018 00:41
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fog boar posted:Can you point me to a document where he discusses this? I assume it's in one of his letters or something but I'm not sure where to start looking. Orcs, "humanoids," et al. as a veil over racist pulp tropes is a topic I've been yammering about with friends for a while but it'd be helpful to have a primary source that I can show people too. HopperUK posted:I found a quote from Letter 153: Letter 269 also (briefly) discusses whether making Orcs irredeemably evil would be heretical from a Catholic standpoint. It's a little less emphatic than I remembered, but still helpful. "Letter 269 posted:With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable... Also if I remember correctly the "twisted Elves" thing is something Tolkien went back and forth on as he considered the implications; making it a definite plot element in LotR was an innovation of the films. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 00:55
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Also: apparently Christopher Tolkien writes about comments his father made to him re: Orcs in chapter 5 of Morgoth's Ring, which I unfortunately do not have in front of me at the moment. e: I found a source online. Tolkien says in a fragmented essay that, if Orcs are a corruption of other creatures, then it can only be on the individual level, because creating a race of inherently evil beings is beyond Morgoth's power and Eru, on the other hand, would never allow the creation of a race of sentient beings that are beyond redemption. He then goes on to speculate that maybe Orcs are, instead, shards of Morgoth embodied in the physical world. (I'm simplifying here, because the relationship between angelic/spiritual beings like Valar and Maiar and physicality is complicated and written about at length elsewhere, but tl;dr version -- Morgoth became fully physical over time, which diminished him in power but gave him greater freedom to act in Middle Earth; also, since he had a hand in singing the song of creation, there was literally a part of him in all physical matter -- although not evenly distributed; for example, water, as a rule, had nearly no element of Morgoth in it.) And if that were the case (orcs as shards of Morgoth) then they don't truly possess a will; they're just automata who appear as rebellious, hateful, and so on, because these things are just the inherent character of evil. However, he notes that this is difficult to reconcile with a reference elsewhere to Sauron teaching the orcs a new language. Then, in a later and much more complete essay, he states emphatically the orcs do have independent wills and were kept in thrall to Morgoth through fear, and that under him, every orc lived in constant awareness of the Eye moving over them -- they were mentally dominated to the point where he compares their existence to that of an ant hive. After Morgoth died they were for a time "leaderless and almost witless" and "without control or purpose" but eventually recovered themselves and even set up small kingdoms and "became accustomed to independence"; however, Sauron initially gained their allegiance by manipulating their hatred of elves and men, and later trained them to the point of unthinking obedience. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 01:06
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The gist of it is that orcs have been steeped in hatred and fear for so long that they don't know anything else, but it's always presented either in terms of culture, or occasionally in theological terms. Orcs are not biologically predisposed to evil, just utterly controlled by evil leaders and spiritually (and on an individual level only) warped by eons of close association with basically-Satan.
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Nov 1, 2018 01:40
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I'm working entirely off memory, but didn't he later comment something along the lines of comparing orcs to literally himself and everyone else during WWI?
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Nov 1, 2018 03:02
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Mirthless posted:I'm phone posting and its hard to reply to everyone when im being dogpiled. God drat dude how am I supposed to keep up? you could just leave.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:29
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm working entirely off memory, but didn't he later comment something along the lines of comparing orcs to literally himself and everyone else during WWI? Something like that: Letter 71 posted:Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in 'realistic' fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For 'romance' has grown out of 'allegory', and its wars are still derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels. But it does make some difference who are your captains and whether they are orc-like per se! e: Letter 66 might also be of interest, he talks about the army and the business of war in general as something that "breed[s] new Saurons" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 03:37
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PST posted:It's not even just that they don't speak out about it, it's that they defend it. They lie about it, they're a cult, bought into the tribalism where any attack on one of them is an attack on all. There probably is a section of consumers that are oblivious or uncomfortable with the most unpleasant wings of OSR, as Mirthless implies, and don't march in lockstep to defend the ones with direct ties to gamergate/comicsgate or who rush to praise and elevate someone like Zak or Raggi, and they are complicit in perpetuating a toxic culture through their unwillingness to speak out. There is also a large fan following to channel into direct harassment at any available target as well. I can understand how it's a lovely position to be tied to, and lord knows I've financially supported people before finding out they were poo poo, too. It'd be great to live in a world with harmful ideologies weren't tied to our make-believe games about elves and cyber-elves, and where every shift in culture wasn't taken as an insidious assault on our stable society by cultural marxists. I don't think it's possible to separate the two, but people also react really poorly to being expected to maturely reevaluate problematic overtones in stuff they consumed as a child. Going "Everything is poo poo, who am I to judge? It's all capitalism anyway!" is a pretty convenient and easy way to avoid the issue altogether, especially if you're not someone who has to be directly harmed by it every day and would only be opting in to the same abuse other people face daily by adding your voice to the discussion.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:47
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There is an oft repeated anecdote that when asked by a fan if the the orcs were based on anyone in particular in WW1, he said that life in the trenches turned everyone into orcs. I haven't been able to find any citation on it though.
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Nov 1, 2018 03:51
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Terrible Opinions posted:There is an oft repeated anecdote that when asked by a fan if the the orcs were based on anyone in particular in WW1, he said that life in the trenches turned everyone into orcs. I haven't been able to find any citation on it though. This RPG.net stuff is wild. I was wondering why that guy slandering the name of Nadreck got banned from the Lensman Let's Read thread - now I know!
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Nov 1, 2018 05:16
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Terrible Opinions posted:There is an oft repeated anecdote that when asked by a fan if the the orcs were based on anyone in particular in WW1, he said that life in the trenches turned everyone into orcs. I haven't been able to find any citation on it though. And the orcs in the movies were literally birthed out of trenches, just saying.
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Nov 1, 2018 05:23
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Nessus posted:This RPG.net stuff is wild. I was wondering why that guy slandering the name of Nadreck got banned from the Lensman Let's Read thread - now I know! And somebody asked if they could ban Antifa talk. (That thread's already locked.)
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Nov 1, 2018 13:12
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Quick break from OSR Shmorkychat to say that I played a session of Mutant Crawl Classics, and had a lot of fun. I totally get the criticisms of the shallow setting (although a decent GM can compensate for this), and a couple of the playable species seem boring, and I'm not sure the game would hold up for some grand years-long campaign. But for a one-shot adventure, I liked it. Our team had a very Guardians of the Galaxy feel to it, with a band of weirdos teaming up for a heist. Some of our mutations meshed in interesting ways. For example, one of my characters was a stretchy Christmas tree-man who could reach across a room and psychically control a creature with a touch. Everyone's characters got to shine a little. One had Cyclops-style laser eyes. After several grisly mishaps, he finally proved his worth by cutting through a locked door (and the enemy behind it). We had a sweet pea vine-man who spit sweet peas as a ranged attack, and was surprisingly useful in our final fight. My genius rat-man repaired a sweet raygun (before getting thrown off a skyscraper; now he's rat jelly). In conclusion, I liked MCC and would play it again. I'd recommend not taking it too seriously, and not being afraid to bend the rules for sake of a fun story. Disclaimer: FWIW, I'm the least rules-lawyery member of my gaming group. I'm getting older and don't get to spend nearly enough time with my friends. I'd rather not spend twenty minutes cross-referencing grappling mechanics; just give us a palette and let us paint a memorable story. Trustworthy fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 14:38
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Mr. Maltose posted:Yeah, it's actually not that hard to tell both racists and people who tolerate racists to gently caress off. It is for this subforum, apparently
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Nov 1, 2018 15:46
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It's simpler to do so when it comes to things that you consume, people that you give money to etc. Not so simple in everyday life, where having to grin and bear certain things is the difference between having a roof over one's head and/or income to support yourself. Of course some people have the privilege of being able to tell people to gently caress off and cut them out of their life over heinous things they say and/or believe, I'm happy they get that chance. Trying to get there myself has been a goal for most of my adult life.
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Nov 1, 2018 20:24
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Nuns with Guns posted:Where were you squatting that Shmorky being a diaper-eating pedo was widely-known an accepted knowledge before being outed a few years ago? No dude, it was pretty much an open secret all the way since 2003-2006. Shmorky wasn't told to gently caress off for it until Lowtax started to find his voice annoying. Until then people still kept on sucking up to that weirdo and dismissed any arguments to the contrary as LIES and baseless SLANDER up until people who weren't indoctrinated into whatever online death cult started taking notice. This is also what happened a dozen other times a forums superstar or moderator was outed as a creep, weirdo, or literal rapist. I mean, yeah, nobody in this specific subforum is at fault for it, but for the most part people go out of their way to be as resolutely ignorant of the bad poo poo that happens here as much as humanly possible. Arthil posted:It's simpler to do so when it comes to things that you consume, people that you give money to etc. Not so simple in everyday life, where having to grin and bear certain things is the difference between having a roof over one's head and/or income to support yourself. Of course some people have the privilege of being able to tell people to gently caress off and cut them out of their life over heinous things they say and/or believe, I'm happy they get that chance. Trying to get there myself has been a goal for most of my adult life. I mean just by regging here we've given money to a white internet funny man who thinks it's okay for him to say friend of the family ironically in 2018. Nobody here (hopefully) is going to try to justify it as a good or okay thing for him to do. What is going to happen though is that they'll ignore it or claim that the people who bring it up are maliciously slandering him, and keep on supporting him and his website financially. And then when he finally decides he's done and either sells or kills the site, everyone will finally decide that, yeah, maybe that actually was a bad thing after all, now that acknowledging it is no longer inconvenient. Financially supporting something bad or problematic is now the absolute default for everyone who ever regged here. As decisive as rpg.net banning MAGA was, it's pretty much impossible for something like that to happen here. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 1, 2018 22:43
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For a dude who keeps bringing up that paying for this site is morally compromised you sure have dropped way more than ten dollars doing so.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:47
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Mr. Maltose posted:For a dude who keeps bringing up that paying for this site is morally compromised you sure have dropped way more than ten dollars doing so. I don't care! I'm a pretty lovely person. Are you relaxed and chill when Lowtax says racist slurs, good person?
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Nov 1, 2018 22:48
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Change word into praxis, my dude. Tax gets no money from me.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:53
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this sure is a new and interesting version of 'hah u typed that on a cell phone, guess you love capitalism'
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Nov 1, 2018 22:54
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Bedlamdan posted:Financially supporting something bad or problematic is now the absolute default for everyone who ever regged here. No ethical consumption under capitalism. That's the default for pretty much every person born in the western world, if not everywhere on this planet. If you hang out here, no matter how woke you consider yourself, there's a pretty good chance you're failing to live up to someones standards of human decency. Does that mean we should not try to be better, and expect the same of others? No, of course not, but I'm not losing sleep over having given the owner of this site 10 bucks back in 2005 or whatever.
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Nov 1, 2018 22:55
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Bedlamdan posted:I don't care! I'm a pretty lovely person. Are you relaxed and chill when Lowtax says racist slurs, good person? Do you have any suggestions for better places we could go to if we don't want to continue to support him?
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Nov 1, 2018 22:55
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Impermanent posted:this sure is a new and interesting version of 'hah u typed that on a cell phone, guess you love capitalism' I'm not sure what cell phone that would be, unless they start producing the Samsung 1488 RACE WAR NOW. Transient People posted:Do you have any suggestions for better places we could go to if we don't want to continue to support him? Honestly, I have no idea. Some people have a serious investment in SA and aren't interested in other places, and I guess that's okay.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:04
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Yeah but I'd take that opportunity if there was a decent spot I don't like rpgnet because its rules are so strict that they don't play nice with the way I talk to other people. I'd get banned in like a week probably, so it's not a super tenable option. If there is another decent, woke-ish hub that's an alternative to SA, I'm all ears.
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Nov 1, 2018 23:07
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Transient People posted:Yeah but I'd take that opportunity if there was a decent spot It's not a static hub, just a Discord, but the RPG Talk Discord is pretty good and has mostly non-assholes. We sometimes call it 'the reddit discord' but it's not really that, reddit just happens to list it first in /r/rpg in its list of non-specific RPG discord servers. e: https://www.lp.zone/ was formed to be a home for SA-quality Let's Play without actually supporting Lowtax or being on SA. I dunno if you wanna consider at least registering there. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 23:29
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Be loyal 2 forum
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Nov 2, 2018 00:00
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bewilderment posted:It's not a static hub, just a Discord, but the RPG Talk Discord is pretty good and has mostly non-assholes. We sometimes call it 'the reddit discord' but it's not really that, reddit just happens to list it first in /r/rpg in its list of non-specific RPG discord servers. These seem neat, thanks! I'll give them a look. 
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Nov 2, 2018 00:15
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I posted on LPzone when it first started but the forums technology they use was really frustrating for me so I stopped. Glad it's still going tho.
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Nov 2, 2018 00:26
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There is a lot you can critique about Lowtax but I think he is correct about the 'Special sauce' which is why this particular comedy forum, however necrotic or homosexual, has kept on rolling. Those three ingredients being, first, putting some skin in the game (through registration fee), second, having active, human moderators (however horrible they turn out to be) and third, having clear rules which are not interpreted in a doctrinaire way. I don't think this formula would be impossible to replicate, although as the taxman himself has discovered you probably can't do it as a primary business. (You probably could break even.) People have not, to my knowledge, ever really attempted it, and as with any social environment the network effect has a large intrinsic value, so you might not be able to have a lot of those kinds of places around.
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Nov 2, 2018 00:58
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