TRPG General Chat

@BESW thanks for the info!

He's being very patient with people in comments, too.

doppelgreener

Remarkably so

In fact, you remarked on it

...so I did.

This Twitter thread is full of great resources:

I’ve always been interested in D&D/fantasy related media & communities but they all seem like overwhelmingly white spaces..? Or am I just mistaken? Is there a show or podcast or something that I can get started with that has some POC involved in making the content?

Tweeted by heyjenbartel on March 26, 2019 at 5:16 PM

12:29 AM

The author seems to have an amazing attitude of "fix the problems with patience and kindness" instead of getting angry and upset. His attitude in the comments is the same attitude that he took to the convention in an attempt to fix the game.

Where there is willingness to listen, and one has the resources to do so, engaging and educating is a very important strategy.

He assumes that others are being racist through unintentional ignorance rather than innate cruelty and treats them as such.

Where there is not willingness to listen, or one does not have the resources to engage and educate, it becomes a drain. Knowing the difference is really important.

You can see other places on his blog where he's quite clear about not wasting resources on people who are just there to argue.

(It's not about deciding someone's being cruel on purpose--there's not much use in diagnosing intent--but more about learning when there's fertile ground. In the case of those comments the other participants clearly telegraphed a willingness to listen but, in one case, little willingness to do their own work. That's the case where he's choosing to put in effort above and beyond; I admire him for doing it but would never expect it of anyone.)

(Notice that one commentor stated up front that they know asking for more input is edging into asking for professional services for free, while the other simply asked for increasing amounts of increasingly tangential information to be delivered to him personally instead of reading the provided context links.)

"Decoded might be a better place than my site for you to start learning about how racism works."
Boom.

Oh of course you can't expect it. If you go around expecting that kind of commitment from people you will be constantly disappointed.

12:37 AM

That's an impressively firm pushback while still actually being helpful.

@linksassin Oh, it's not about me being disappointed. It's about a commentor expecting a marginalized person to hand-hold them through their own refusal to help themselves, for free.

@BESW I didn't mean you in particular, more as a metaphorical you.

@nitsua60 Yeah, after the second time the commentor clearly wasn't interested in reading the links already provided, he disengaged by pointing at the resources again. That was good.

One thing I really like about his presentation overall is that he's constantly amplifying other voices and emphasizing how he's working within and alongside a very broad community.

So many blogs (in every field!) place the blogger at the center of the content, which isn't really great for so many reasons.

Yeah I'm actually not sure how some people have the nerve to ask certain questions like that

In this case, it's REALLY great that the person recognized they don't have the context and that their confusion is about ignorance rather than disagreement.

12:47 AM

It seems like it should be more obvious that a little personal effort and research goes a long way

@BESW yeah

It's less great that they seem to expect an article about an RPG encounter and the history of a very specific food item's cultural baggage, to explain the history of black Southern cuisine as a tool of racial oppression.

I mean, I do have sympathy for people just not knowing certain context

But if I recognize I don't know certain context I don't go straight to someone who has to live it?

The Next CEO of Stack Overflow

Joel Spolsky on March 28, 2019

Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come. Only six months after we had launched Stack Overflow, my co-founder Jeff Atwood and I were invited to speak at a Microsoft conference for developers in Las Vegas. We were there, I think, to demonstrate that you could use their latest ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated …

It's outright exasperating that Hodes had already provided off-site links to that context and the person asked Hodes to instead explain it himself, ignoring the wider community of context which is what he was missing in the first place.

Yeah

That's kinda what I mean

12:54 AM

Compare the commentor who wanted specific additional information about something in Hodes' area of professional expertise (so it's not "hey marginalized person, use your limited resources to explain things so I don't have to do the work," it's a matter of recognizing professional skills) and then asked how Hodes wanted to engage in that exchange.

That's definitely better

Today in Unironic Escapes: Criminal nearly escapes the continent of Australia

@nitsua60 I... [bites tongue]

@nitsua60 Classic australia. He would probably have made it if one of the fuel tanks wasn't full of beer.

@BESW ...have thoughts on how a system intentionally designed to treat users/contributors as interchangable parts ended up not creating a welcoming community?

1:00 AM

> The type of people Stack Overflow serves has changed, and now, as a part of the developer ecosystem, we have a responsibility to create an online community that is far more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of newcomers. In the decade or so since Stack Overflow started, the number of people employed as software developers grew by 64% in the US alone.

@linksassin I dunno... the physicist in me thinks he'd have made it if only he'd drunk the beer (and thereby perspired/peed it away) quicker, for the mass term in this rocket equation =)

(They're framing diversity as a recent thing they have to adapt to, rather than an always thing they've just recently been forced to care about. That tells me a lot about how they're going to implement the change, practically speaking.)

@nitsua60 People have tried that crossing in an inflatable raft before... didn't go so well

@BESW the conversation over the blog post you linked raises two questions in my head....

first off, "which factors weigh towards subversion of a given discriminatory media trope vs avoiding it altogether?" (ISTM that both are valid approaches to the issue, but I'm not sure if there are any strong preferences one way or another from folks who have to deal with RL discrimination more than I have)

> So when you create content about marginalized people, don’t stop at obvious signifiers. Racists forced Chinese Americans to sell fortune cookies to survive, so leaving this fraught symbol in Chinese hands is your safest bet.

This is the same principle we see in the Luxton Technique: when dealing with a traumatic subject, give control to the people who have been traumatized by it.

1:11 AM

@BESW that works for direct symbology like the fortune cookie example, but how would you apply that to tropes that are further removed from any specific RL group?

I think you're looking for one-size-fits-all formulas to avoid harm. They don't exist.

There are guidelines and procedures you can apply to the process of creation, but not formulas.

@BESW good link -- the point about "make misuse difficult" is an underestimated one, and it flows into my other question actually!

you see, when trying to build a robust system, one of the tools that we have from the safety-engineering domain is James Reason's Swiss Cheese Model

Swiss cheese model

The Swiss cheese model of accident causation is a model used in risk analysis and risk management, including aviation safety, engineering, healthcare, emergency service organizations, and as the principle behind layered security, as used in computer security and defense in depth. It likens human systems to multiple slices of swiss cheese, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by the differing layers and types of defenses which are "layered" behind each other. Therefore, in theory, lapses and weaknesses in one defense do not allow a risk to materialize...

given that xenophobia is pretty much a given of the human condition (best I can tell, we got it as a hand-me-down from chimps), the idea is "given that something bad happened, how do we break it down to find the specific gaps that allowed latent discrimination or discriminatory intent to manifest itself as a bad act and plug those effectively?"

I don't think anyone can definitively answer that question

Especially confronting it like some kind of engineering problem?

yeah, as BESW indicated, it's a procedural guideline, not a one-size-fits-all formulaic step-by-step methodology

There's hundreds of fields with thousands and millions of people over countless years who've working on that one. To my mind, specifically as an RPG design problem, a MAJOR key is to build a team that's positioned to identify potential gaps as they occur--like if you want to do a Korean adventure, get a Korean artist to do the illustrations?

SO MANY descriminatory problems seem unsolved simply because the groups with the most experience and expertise aren't listened to.

So if you want a simple rule, here it is: when something bad happens, put a lot of the people it happened to at the head of the table when you're trying to solve it.

1:26 AM

the question to me, though, is "is the sort of specific-experience-deconstructionism that this approach tends to require perceived, at least somewhat, as a discounting of lived experience? because what I perceive is some sort of 'whole identity' movement in some circles, where you can't separate individual sticking points/pitfalls from the overall tone of discrimination?"

@BESW sounds like the difference between asking a DBA to help you design your DB-driven app and plowing ahead on it when nobody on the team knows what Third Normal Form is

@Shalvenay The word "intersectionality," in a social framework sense, was coined for that purpose.

@BESW mind expanding on that?

@BESW and heck, that statement is true even if you drop the "discriminatory" from it

"Intersectional" was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe a legal anti-discrimination loophole: black women couldn't sue companies for hiring discrimination if the companies hired black men and white women.

@BESW interesting. did not know that

Living At The Intersection

►

1:30 AM

so it was originally used to capture discrimination based on combinations of traits, then?

Not exactly; a combination which produces a unique experience that can't be described by a simple Venn diagram of the traits being combined.

[gestures above] I am going to amplify a black woman's voice instead of use my own.

4

(The last time I tried to explain this, I really messed it up.)

user15026

@BESW Oh this is an excellent video.

Not sure I've seen this one

And here, have a queer Latinx woman's take on something I said above (I was trying to paraphrase her because I hadn't been able to track this down):

One other thing... speaking from lots of experience and I mean lots. More than 10 times. Hire an inclusion and diversity consultant BEFORE you blow your art budget. Better yet, just hire a person of color as your art director if you’re trying that hard to represent them.

Tweeted by BoldBebo on March 26, 2019 at 4:42 PM

Seems fair to me

1:37 AM

commenting on the video (which is not too bad on the "short and sweet" factor btw, I was a bit concerned it'd be a meandering 1h long talk or smth like that): I see trolls trying to argue that "because you care about NN, you don't care about Facebook being abusive" etc on a regular basis, and the comment about "we don't lead single-issue lives" resonates with the responses given to those trolls

"you care about A, so you must not care about B" seems like something of a bad-faith argument form to begin with, even, no? I don't lead a single-issue life for sure, even with how monorail-brained I can be at times, so why would anyone else?

Yes. That is a facile false dichotomy.

Trolling of the lowest order

user15026

This reminds me of that thing where you just fling retorts at people so they can't possibly fight them all.

@Ash Gish gallop.

user15026

Like the idea where you must yell equally about ALL THINGS AT ALL TIMES or you are bad at the thing.

1:42 AM

@Ash The internet?

user15026

@BESW yes thank you

user15026

I knew there was a word.

Toni Morrison said something similar... [rummages]

I didn't realize there was a word for that

> The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

1:46 AM

the other thing that intersectionality reminds me of is that couldn't we see it as a synergistic effect between multiple forms of discrimination? kind of like how you have chemical A with effect X, and chemical B with effect Y, but A+B together have an effect that's more potent than the simple sum of effects X and Y?

Apropos of everything, let me drop one of my "point of privilege" comments in here:

As usual, this room and its occupants strike me as a model for civility and kindness and honest engagement on the internet. I believe it's because you all are patient, you listen, you speak from experience and are open to challenging ideas. Thank you.
It's a whole-room thing, and you-all do it so well that people coming new to the room learn the culture quickly and well and are demonstrably unafraid of asking questions or of challenging those norms.
And when something untoward does happen, chatizens stay calm, they handle even obnoxious and aggressive trolls with grace and patience, and use…

8

@Shalvenay Superficially, yes, but that would then imply that the effects of intersectionality are reliably subject to established predictions and interactions based on the experience of an outside observer, while framing the victims of discrimination as passive subjects of study. I'd want to avoid that.

@doppelgreener @BESW thanks :) sorry I've been popping in and out. It's been...a day. And is still continuing to throw curve balls at me. Thanks for the words of support.

:)

1:52 AM

Don't apologize for being busy! We don't feel neglected, we know you've got stuff.

Cool cool. I just didn't want my silence to be taken for antipathy or ingratitude. Especially in light of how much I appreciate it.

With that being said off to put out more (figurative) RL fires.

Ttfn!

Good luck!

We'll be here when you need us.

@nitsua60 Thank you for saying that. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't true, but I think sometimes we take it for granted.

@nitsua60 also this is very nice. This is one place on the internet I know I can come and have a relatively pleasant and engaging experience. I'm glad for this community and the culture that those have come before have managed to create.

(now gone for realsies)

And thank you for contributing to sustaining and growing the room culture!

Thankyou all. TBH this is the first online community I have come back to more than a few times. Positive interaction, knowledgeable peers and a great culture. I'm proud to say I get to be a small part of it.

2:07 AM

<3

@linksassin Same, this is the only public-ish community I contribute to regularly online since... when did Order of the Phoenix come out?

@BESW 2003... I was 8.

...that can't be right. Maybe it was HPB in 2005.

@linksassin [feels weirdly old]

I was active on some webcomic forums and fandom corners of LJ until probably about 2005ish, when I started going dark and just focusing on private chats and lurking, until an RPG friend pointed me here in 2012.

Lol

user15026

@BESW saaaame

2:17 AM

Definitely no one pointed me to this place

Nuh uh

user15026

I don't recall how I got here, specifically

There's no way it can be proven

user15026

I know how I got to SE, and to Arqade, but elseplace is...murky

XD

This is the first stack I joined. It was a good choice. :D

2:25 AM

@Ash hnq, maybe?

@Ash I got to SE many times when googling LaTeX things I couldn't remember or figure out, and one day noticed an icosahedron icon in the sidebar.....

I think I was a lurker here for maybe 6 month before I ever actually signed up. I think I found it via google.

@nitsua60 I found RPG.SE because a programmer friend at my RPG table said "Hey, I saw this in the HNQ and you can answer it..."

And that's how I learned anything about the Stack at all. Took me a few months to figure out everyone else thought of it as a programming thing.

I'm a regular viewer of Overflow but never felt a need to signup. This site was the one that flipped the switch.

@BESW did you? Answer it?

And this is the perfect reason that HNQ exists!

A: What is the name of this specific, online DM (4e) tool?

2:28 AM

10

I'm pretty sure you're describing power2ool.com. Great little tool for making my unusual DM whims look official. Sometimes it'll get stuck on a "Connecting Socket" load screen. This means your adblocking or scriptblocking features are stopping it from connecting (easy to fix) or your modem/ISP s...

user15026

@nitsua60 Actually, I wonder if the husbandperson is to blame for here-ness. He's not active on the site (or SE at all really anymore really) but is super into RPG stuff, so...

@BESW Sounds like a cool tool.

It was!

Yeah good luck using it now

I honestly think it had a lot to do with just how many characters I made in 4e

@Ash kind of a shame, too :/

user15026

2:32 AM

@Shalvenay eh, I understand his reasons. :)

2:46 AM

The Stack is emphatically not for everyone (see waaaaaaay above).

Yeah I have extremely limited interest in anything but this chat

user15026

@BESW Oh most definitely

Glazius

I knew alterstacks were a thing and I showed up and looked around a while a while ago, but I didn't really start using until I started trying to run a weekly public sampler game of the various stuff from my FLGS's back shelf and needed something to do while waiting for people to never show up.

KorvinStarmast

3:02 AM

@Glazius needed something to do while waiting for people to never show up yeah, that happens in a variety if RPG situations.

3:13 AM

Needing something to do while waiting is what brought me to chat from the main site.

4:05 AM

Need opinion from the room. I'll running a session tonight where the players need to protect a town from a group of orc. The orcs are being controlled by a Mind-Flayer. It's a precursor session to a larger scale war. My problem is we are playing pathfinder and I can't decide what stats to use for the Mind-Flayer.

I've been trying to track down 3.5e stats but I don't own the MM3.5 and they aren't available online. Am I better off using the 3.0 stats or adapting the 5e stats? I have the MM for 5e.

@linksassin I take it there isn't a PF equivalent monster?

@Shalvenay I'm on it.

user15026

As someone with a memory that is more holes than cheese, I am in awe, generally of @BESW's ability to make the Internet cough up the bits.

@Shalvenay Not really. There is psionics but they don't quite have the same flavour. Illithids are WOTC copyright and PF can't use them.

Common Pathfinder substitutions (because mind flayers are D&D copyrighted material and can't be ported legally to non-D&D materials) are seugathi; aboleths; and neothelids. Pathfinder's stats are close enough to D&D 3.5's that you barely need to convert at all.

4:10 AM

@linksassin yeah, I'd just use the 3.0 stats then if that's the only MM you have handy. backporting from 5e is going to be way more work than it's worth

@Shalvenay 3.0 stats can be found online I think. I had planned to use 3.5 but can't find them, I've done that in that past for other creatures though.

@Ash I googled pathfinder mind flayer, found a Reddit page recommending substitutions, then back-searched to find the Pathfinder SRD pages for each.

Google Fu

user15026

@BESW I like that you explain to me how you get places. Because often, since my memory is...not great, I worry it's just that people know stuff and I never will know all the stuff

No one will ever know all the stuff

4:13 AM

@Ash There is a bit of skill in know how to google quickly and effectively.

For me, the skill lies in nesting searches from broad to specific: early searches aren't looking for the final material, just giving me new search terms.

That right there is a quality search tip.

user15026

I know how to find things (because I have to, effectively, outsource remembering a lot of the time), but I often struggle with how to phrase it to start.

I do have some resources in my brain that I can draw on for common subjects, like for Fate stuff I add site:fate-srd.com or "fred hicks" to narrow down hits to more useful stuff.

(As you can see I'm also moderately fluent in Boolean operators, which helps a LOT.)

user15026

(But...honestly that's more to do with how I tend to make word pictures of things that are hard to translate to how Google thinks)

4:16 AM

@Ash Yes, this: effective searching is entirely predicated on being able to speak in ways that the Google machine learning patterns can pick up on.

Yeah

user15026

Sorry, I tend to sometimes just get curious about how more-NT-ish humans approach things. I can shush

I don't know exactly what happened, but a few years ago Google did something behind the scenes which almost completely reset my Google fluency.

Sometimes I search something that should be easy and can't get it anyway

user15026

@BESW I....struggle with that.

4:18 AM

Anybody remember Ask Jeeves? One of the first search engines that tried to process natural-language queries.

Yeah

I remember that

Nowadays you often get BETTER results if your searches include phrases like "how do I" rather than just the keywords.

user15026

I vaguely recall using that when I would get mad at whatever AOL search used

@BESW All over the throw-backs today. Classic fun

user15026

@BESW hm, I never considered that

4:19 AM

...What else was a throwback today?

Everything is a throwback

@BESW Harry potter from 2003?

@Ash It's partly because the machines have learned how to parse variable significance from different parts of phrases; but also because sites like the Stack and ask.com have populated the web with more results containing those extra phrases.

Oh, right.

Lol

user15026

That makes sense.

user15026

4:21 AM

(sorry for distractifying the conversation)

A long time ago, "What is the difference between lunar and solar calendars" wouldn't have gotten you many useful hits because the Internet had explanations of that thing but nobody was asking that thing. Now even the explanations are titled as questions.

@Ash Hey, that's what we do here!

user15026

@BESW That reminds me, I still need to figure that out because I am still confused

Yes, I had a hard time finding good visual explanations of that last night.

user15026

Maybe I will just need to draw myself one.

user15026

I have time yet to figure it out.

4:24 AM

So the recommendation for my question was to keep hunting to 3.5 stat and use 3.0 if I can't find them. I might have a 3.5 MM pdf floating around somewhere. @BESW Thanks for the alternatives but they won't quite suit my use case

3.0 is mostly compatible with 3.5 but has some significant gaps.

4:53 AM

@Ash Easy explanation: You use the lunar calendar if you live on the moon, and you use the solar calendar if you live on the sun.

I guess I have to use an Earth calendar then

Go figure I've been using a bad calendar all this time

The lunar calendar has no days. Only nights.

Now I just have to figure out what an Earth calendar is

The solar calendar has a 1-day week, since it's always daytime on the sun, so there's no transition between weekdays. Similarly, the lunar calendar has 1 month.

The lunar calendar only deals with days where the moon is out. If there is no moon time stops until it shows up again

@MikeQ At that rate it is still the first day of the solar system on the sun.

4:58 AM

@linksassin I never said it was a very complex calendar

Saying "I'll see you tomorrow" on a solar calendar is a massive insult

Just a big ol square for Sunday, and nothing else

"Today is day."

"What day is today?" "Yes"

Today is today

Tomorrow is never

Yesterday was a long time ago

@linksassin There's a pathfinder final fantasy rpg of extremely questionable legality that has mindflayer stats.

5:07 AM

Next week doesn't exist

@Miniman That certainly doesn't sound like it's legit. I've found a couple of homebrew stats that could work if needed. Thanks for the help everyone

(I actually went looking for final fantasy "cultists", I'm a little disappointed in whoever wrote that for changing the name.)

Lol

Are they illithids in hoods?

5:24 AM

God morgon

Mod Gorgon

Mood gorning

user15026

@trogdor hey how did you find out my true identity

Lol

You should ask how Kviiri got so close

XD

It's not my fault I reversed the two front letters, the words were just begging for it

user15026

Either way I feel suddenly seen in new ways! THE SHOCK AND HORROR, I tell you

5:38 AM

Lol

I'm sure having extremely changeable snakes for hair? Didn't already accomplish that

user15026

I thought that the hat covered them well enough

user15026

Note to self, bigger hat

@trogdor Swedish is the language of secret truths

@kviiri XD

@Ash lol

6:01 AM

@kviiri now say it in Swedish

@V2Blast Svenska är hemliga verkligheters språk

Hmm, maybe needs an article. My Swedish isn't quite fluent

Kiswedi ni lugha ya... hitting vocabulary boundaries

7:21 AM

@trogdor Except without the hoods :P

ah

so just very conspicuous mindflayer heads

XD

Yeah, exactly. They changed "evil eyes" to not look like beholders, but for some reason they only changed the name for illithids and left everything else the same.

..now I'm remembering Johnny Carcosa, which means I'm remembering Neonomicon and I would've been fine to never remember Neonomicon ever again forever, thank you.

7:45 AM

you are welcome

that will be all your feels please

@Someone_Evil [wave]

Someone_Evil

@BESW [wave back] I guess

What's new?

Someone_Evil

Another day, another reaction to run..

9:07 AM

Why are all movies about assassins about “elite assassins” and not ones who are just doing ok and sorta dreading their next assassin performance review?

Tweeted by baddestmamajama on March 28, 2019 at 2:51 AM

[scribbles game notes]

9:19 AM

"you are a very cozy dragon," a one-person larp. (pay-what-you-want PDF)

@trogdor @Ash [gestures above]

One person?

@BESW The non-élite ones tend to be called other names - killers, buttonmen, goons etc.

The name isn't the point?

@trogdor Yes. A LARP even you can play!

Lol

9:34 AM

anyway, who said I need to "play" this? :P

9:58 AM

[grin] I think you might be okay just knowing it exists. I think Ash will want to play it for sure.

10:11 AM

@BESW I'm fairly sure I've seen a film about less-expert assassins... but I can't recall which

@BESW I mean there do seem to be media (including films) that feature people who kill for money and aren't élite, but I'm pretty sure they are presented so differently that nobody thinks of those characters as 'assassins'. Yet this is pretty much what e.g. the buttonman sent by the gangster to silence a witness is.

@BESW that is fair XD

10:37 AM

@kviiri I like the idea of a story about assassins as blue collar workers.

The ordinary Joes in a John Wick world.

but then what?

it doesn't sound that exciting

Maybe an InSpectres type thing.

Taking jobs, making rent, developing resources.

sure

@trogdor That's probably a useful view-flip whenever asking a question about why we don't have more [insert something] in media: does this something happen to be a narrow niche interest that isn't an interest for most people (which leads to it not selling enough cinema tickets etc.).

@vicky_molokh well, its also possible that many ideas need at least a little more than the initial pitch

sometimes just a little even

like, making it a bit like InSpectres makes it sound a lot better

10:54 AM

No subject is boring except in the telling of it; unfortunately that's not the popular wisdom amongst the people who decide what media to pick up and distribute, because they want to predict success based on data and it's easier to gather data on content and subject.

(Which in turn reinforces the data because the supposedly unpopular stuff doesn't get picked up and pushed as much so it's still a tiny fraction of the data.)

yeah

I mean, you could make a superhero movie that is boring because it has the hero doing something no one cares about

like 2 hours of them grocery shopping

no one else even talks to them or anything

And yet, that'd mostly be boring because we came for a superhero movie.

yeah maybe

but like,... I don't know if I want to watch a movie about a normal person grocery shopping alone

with no other people to even talk to or anything

either way I was just trying to use an example

If it was a film about a woman falling in love with a guy she only ever sees at the grocery store...

It'd probably get a Sundance screening and several award nominations.

maybe?

I guess?

does that mean it was necessarily entertaining though?

11:01 AM

You might still not want to see it personally because you're not too big on romance, but if the story's told well, any story can be engaging.

@BESW also true

but that's also why I took away all other humans to interact with in the scenario

though I suppose done well that could still be,... something?

it wouldn't be easy I think

Why is he the only person in the store? I'm already interested before I know anything about how it's shot or written or directed.

[grin]

But like... [rummages]

@trogdor Literary fiction seems to be getting a lot of pushes, yet seems to be way less popular than genre fiction.

@BESW lol, curse you

fine, a movie about staring at a wall, no commentary, no other people

no sound

no movement

there

everyone hates it

I win XD

@trogdor People who hate censors love it, because they aren't obliged to watched but censors are.

11:08 AM

Watch this scene with the sound muted. Most of it is just a conversation between two guys. But the acting and the camerawork, the lighting, the editing--all make it REALLY fun and tense to watch even when you know nothing about what they're saying.

(I recall some film about drying paint or the like being made specifically in order to annoy censors who are obliged to watch it before slapping a rating.)

so I can't win

the game is rigged

@vicky_molokh censor are what?

@Derpy Obliged.

I thought this is a legit sentence structure in English.

@Derpy they have to watch it

censors are the people who have to watch the movie to give it it's rating

11:11 AM

Empire (1964 film)

Empire is a 1964 black-and-white silent film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time. Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was "to see time go by." One week after the film was shot, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who was cinematographer for Empire) speculated in the Village Voice that Warhol's movie would have...

Blue (1993 film)

Blue is the twelfth and final feature film by director Derek Jarman, released four months before his death from AIDS-related complications. Such complications had already rendered him partially blind at the time of the film's release, only being able to see in shades of blue. The film was his last testament as a film-maker, and consists of a single shot of saturated blue colour filling the screen, as background to a soundtrack where Jarman's and some of his long-time collaborators' narration describes his life and vision. == Structure == Blue is split into two halves, each with differing narration...

@trogdor In germany, "The grave of the fireflies" for a very long time had the rating "can be viewed by childrens 6yrs+". Basically, that would be "Everyone" under ESRB rating.

My joke was that they are supposed to watch the movie before giving the rating but I am not very sure that actually always happens :P

@Derpy ah ok

I thought you were actually confused

I mean, "Graves of the fireflies" basically starts with the following quote:

> "September 21, 1945. That was the night I died,"

Ah, so the sentence structure was OK.

@vicky_molokh yeah

11:17 AM

@vicky_molokh yep, sorry if that wasn't clear enough. I was making fun of the fact that often the "censors" don't even seem to know what the movie is about.

"Graves of the fireflies" has been described as an "heartwarming story about two kids that manage to live thru the second world war."

@Derpy Every now and then you run into something where it's more impactful because of a change the censors required.

@Derpy And Huckleberry Finn is "goes rafting, goes home."

@BESW I saw an Happy Tree Friends (a series that attempts to mock children animated shows by having a cute look but very violent content) dvd collection being given the E rating once....

(In the original Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker animated film, the villain is killed by having his heart pierced with a projectile. The censors demanded a change, and in the final cut his death is a prolonged electrocution shown dramatically in projected shadow as he flails about screaming.)

Ah, malicious compliance in protest at its finest.

At any rate, stories tend to be interesting because we care about the people in them, much more than anything else.

11:27 AM

yeah

I think that's fair

And there are all KINDS of ways to help us care, almost all of which are about how the story is told rather than what kind of story it is.

In D&D we care about our characters at first mostly because of all the time and effort we sunk into making them. Over time we might come to care about them for story reasons... or just because we've invested more and more play time in them.

> Cut of the stabbing sounds during the Shower scene, that will surely make the movie more child-friendly.
BBFC, Britain, talking about Psycho

That's one way to get folks to care about a character in a story--have us spend time with them. Even if we hate them, that's a kind of investment in what happens to them.

A story about low-tier assassins worrying about performance reviews already has hooks to help us care: we can identify with worrying about our jobs and impressing our bosses, and we're engaged with the idea of an exotic, dangerous power-fantasy job.

Ah, re: malicious compliance, that reminds me of one of my favorite bits from The Unknown Soldier

Having been caught of doing I-don't-recall-what indiscipline, some soldiers are ordered to punitive "watch duty", standing watch in full gear in a clearing. They exchange some pointed words with the other soldiers keeping an eye on them

@Rubiksmoose [wave]

11:40 AM

Then an air raid comes, and everyone runs for shelter but the stubborn nuts, still standing their punitive watch in full gear, just scream that "We aren't going anywhere! We're on punitive watch duty!"

@BESW What do you think makes most audiences care about genre fiction characters (like Bella Swan, James Bond or Black Widow), but few audiences care about literary fiction characters (I can't even remember an example)?

(no one dies in the raid)

@vicky_molokh I think the impression is inaccurate and the categories are facile.

Elaborate?

"Genre" vs "literary" is just an artificial way to tell people what they should feel good about reading vs what they should feel guilty about reading.

Almost every "literary classic" was genre fiction when it was first published.

And people care about the characters in both.

11:44 AM

@BESW I never imagined that most classics would fit the definition of literary fiction, given how they tend to be plot-driven and have characters who are unaverage and get into non-average situations.

@BESW howdy!

Not all fiction is equally character-oriented, either, which explains some of the perceived patterns.

A lot of classics are mythology, sci-fi, aventure etc. That's genre fiction right there.

Hence why I specified "literary classic."

What I'm saying is that most literary classics are not themselves literary fiction by the criteria of literary fiction.

Which is hella confusing, yes.

11:47 AM

....you're operating on a completely different concept of literary fiction than I've ever seen. Which kind of proves my point about these categories being nonsense.

Literary fiction, as a category, is completely unrelated to a novel's content; it's purely a statement of perceived quality or merit.

@Rubiksmoose How's it going?

I found that there's a term for a series of characteristics that I have observed in some works, and that the term can be used to group them together to make it clear of the sort I'm talking about: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction#Characteristics

> A concern with social commentary, political criticism, or reflection on the human condition.
A focus on "introspective, in-depth character studies" of "interesting, complex and developed" characters, whose "inner stories" drive the plot, with detailed motivations to elicit "emotional involvement" in the reader.
A slower pace than popular fiction: "literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way".
A concern with the style and complexity of the writing: "elegantly written, lyrical, and ... layered".

And what I found is that slow-paced, introspective, not-very-plot-oriented, complexity-oriented works that require repeated re-reading of a paragraph, don't seem to get turned into multimillioneuro films.

And yet, none of those are necessary or sufficient to fulfill the common definition of the term you find at the beginning of that same article. I'm not going to indulge another definition quibble about terms that are easily researchable--especially since my point is that they aren't solidly definable. Media categories like this are describing prospective audiences, not the content of the work themselves.

I see that my choice to use the term as a shorthand did not add clarity to the conversation and will think about how to backtrack without turning it into another derail.

@BESW oh it's going. No unpleasant surprises at least so far today. So a marked improvement!