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Dintiradan

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Easygoing Eyebeast

Easygoing Eyebeast (14/17)

  1. A (belated) merry Christmas to everyone! Have some stale kruidnoten!
  2. i can't imagine what issues you could possibly have with the film's depiction of sam (that was the film you were referring to, right?)
  3. hey stop waxing nostalgic you're gonna make me want to finish the scenario i started in early 2006
  4. It's not that people are offended on behalf of fictional orcs, it's that people are bothered by how orcs are frequently racially coded, in a way that, say, nephils and sliths aren't. This has its origins with Tolkien: These days, the concern seems to be less orcs-as-yellow-peril and more orcs-as-black-people, though really they can be stand-ins for any group that's othered. More than once I've seen authors make pretty clear parallels between orcs and North American natives while still casting them as unambiguous adversaries, which is concerning when you consider the philosophies of Gary "Nits Make Lice" Gygax. Moreover, a lot of the narrative write-ups for half-orcs mirror real life anxieties about miscegenation in a way that you don't see for, say, half-elves. Again, see Tolkien and the Uruk-Hai. You could argue that orcs aren't alone in carrying this sort of baggage. For instance, a lot of common dwarf tropes trace their way back to Wagner's portrayal on them. But those anti-Semitic takes aren't reinforced through mechanics or narrative write-ups. The portrayal of orcs as tribal and uncivilized, hulking but lacking in intelligence, savage and menacing, ugly and crude, and practising barbaric customs is reinforced, in both narrative and mechanics. I don't think it's impossible to do orcs well in a setting. You could make sure not to portray orcs as having a monoculture. You could make the real-life parallels a deliberate part of your campaign and explore the ramifications during play (only if your players are okay with this type of game!). Or you could go with something more lighthearted and make your orcs like the football hooligans of 40K. You could go the Peter Jackson route and have your half-orcs literally come from holes in the ground. What would it be like being part of a rootless, culture-less people created only for war? How would you move beyond that? But all that assumes players and DM are sitting down before the campaign begins to discuss the setting, and that hasn't always been the assumed approach. Here's what elves are like, here's what dwarves are like, here's what halflings are like. And here's the combat statistics for the Others, along with all the good stuff that falls out once you kill them.
  5. (Timely enough, I was reading this thread earlier today, which predictably contains a few apologists promoting the most charitable reading possible.) I'm with Kel: the "solely" qualifier makes things difficult. Let's take a recent example: getting rid of negative ability modifiers for your character's species (notably, the negative INT modifier for orcs). There's the clearly stated reason why this change was made, but there's also the modern WotC design philosophy (not just for D&D) of avoiding the feel-bad of negative modifiers, as well as a shift to adding more choice in ability modifiers (so you don't end up with the same species/class combinations all the time). These factors aren't the primary motivation for the change, but they still are factors. Does it still count as a change made "solely" to avoid offense? It's also going to be a lot tougher to divine TSR's motivations for certain changes, because companies as a whole (and WotC in particular) are a lot more open these days, and active on social media -- and their communications are a lot easier to google. Not saying that TSR never communicated with its fanbase, but you can't find those communications with a casual Google search. Topic drift is a proud SpidWeb tradition!
  6. Well, this is a yearly tradition, for me if for no one else, so I did it again. Comparing my results to previous years, it looks like I've had a nosedive in the "Cheerfulness" and "Trust" subcategories. How perplexing. Anyway, a family member shared another Facebook post rife with Holocaust references, so I'm off to read that! EDIT: I wonder if mods see edited messages. Anyway, I don't want to bump a thread that pretty much only I use, so here's the latest results. Wheeeee!
  7. Why start a new thread when an old one will do the trick? They say that threads lose half their value when you drive them off the lot, but I say that used threads are still worth something. Especially when they're my used threads. I've made fried plantains a couple times this past month, and I've been... underwhelmed? They weren't bad or anything, but I've heard people go on about them as if they were ambrosia, and I found them just... fine. Am I missing some crucial step (cut into thin slices and soaked in cold water + salt + garlic powder for an hour-ish, then fried in vegetable oil with some extra salt sprinkled on)? Or should I be trying some other form of plantain dish? I made a double batch of saltwater taffy for a family gathering this weekend, stealing this recipe. Some lessons learned: add the food colouring before you pour the mixture into the cooling pans, because if you mix it in the cooling pans it will be a lot harder to pry the cooled taffy out. Also you have to figure out the precise amount of butter to grease your hands with when pulling, because too much and the taffy won't recombine, and too little and you'll end up a sticky mess. Oh, and you'll have to regrease your hands constantly. My biggest mistake was trying to be fancy and make a design with two different colours mixed. The two strands wouldn't stick together at first (too much butter on my hands?), and by the time I got it into a single rope most of it had turned into a wholly unappetizing grey. If anyone has any suggestions for this I'm all ears. Taste-wise it was a smash hit. Using rum extract (all I had in the house) made them taste like Werther's Original.
  8. Pierre Berton's The Great Depression is actually the first Berton I've read (well, other than The Secret World of Og). I can see why he's "history for people who don't like history" -- he's got a light, narrative style. But I'm looking for something a bit more thorough and footnote-laden. I also read Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf (the infamous "bro" version). I don't have much to compare it to, as the only other translation I've read is Seamus Heany's. And Eaters of the Dead, if that counts? She, uh, really likes alliteration? Astro City continues to be Very Good. Still looking for one more trade to finish the run.
  9. I really haven't been reading much lately, have I? I have a barely-read stack of non-fiction from Value Village, acquired because I thought it was a way to read about topics I wouldn't have thought to seek out normally. The last one I finished was Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 by Constance Backhouse, which took me months because I only read it when I was puppy-sitting. It covers a wide range of topics, all centred on six different case studies. Detailed while still being accessible to a layperson like me. My biggest problem with the book is that the previous owner must have been a heavy smoker.
  10. *pours out a fifth for the FreeNode of old*
  11. Be careful what you wish for.
  12. This isn't terrifying at all. Using an Avadon splash screen because its art is more photorealistic compared to other Spiderweb games. Though I'm sure you could get some delightful abominations by animating art from other games. (Here's the usual disclaimer about how MyHeritage and other ancestry sites make a profit by selling your data, and how they've also had big security breaches in the past, so be cautious about giving them personal data. Burner accounts are your friend.)
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