Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Here, have a bias test for subconscious racism: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The funny thing is that I score moderate prejudice towards black folks(which seems to be par for the course looking at the end results) while scoring little to no prejudice towards Middle-Eastern folks, a group whom I have had the actual negative experience of being harassed and followed by on the streets a few times. Perhaps it's the visual factor between the two exercises, or the fact that even if you've had some negative experiences with an ethnic group, the sheer fact that you live among them helps temper prejudice.
Gonna need to dive into Putnam later to research this.
That's what I said.
Have you heard of the GTA Gang? This is what the people have taken to call them by.
Apparently, they are responsible for up to 20 murders in the Moscow's near countryside, which they commit completely at random, leaving without any trace bar cases and bullets. They don't even take loot. According to witnesses, they can place five bullets in the head of a driver in a moving car, and if that doesn't sound professional enough, their bullets can't be used to track a gun that fired them, they maintain radio silence and apparently have a good knowledge of police procedures.
Police is helpless, however, they're being tracked by a group of illegal street racers.
If it doesn't sound like a plot of Vin Diesel's new movie, then I don't know what does. Because it's not Russia if it isn't hardcore.
I feel like now is the time to confess how I've been feeling about this forum for a long while (spoilered if you don't have the time to listen to me whine):
I'm not even sure why I'm here. This place feels like Neverland in that discussions rarely go anywhere and everyone feels like the same users we were a few years ago. I guess part of the problem is that we are supposed to be a small and close-knit community, yet I always dissociated my real life from the robotic eye avatar. And while my real life counterpart is living a dynamic life of meeting people and animals, learning new hobbies, getting introduced to protests, falling in love, and learning new things about my friends, this Internet user has been just getting annoyed at things for the past few years.
I think the forum spirit also took a serious hit when people like Khwarizmi, Bob, Counterclock, Conductor, etc. stopped being active regularly. The community used to be more variegated and fun, but the relative diversity has drained with time.
Eh, can't say I disagree with most of that, although I'm not quite sure about "a few years ago"
It's all trade-offs. Banning dedicated shitposters decreases drama and derails, but also the times in which they were funny. We have a board where people can complain about the pettiest of things, but it also leads to folks who have lots of stuff to do in meatspace stepping out because they either don't have the time or the mental bandwidth to enter in.
If it's mainly that you miss the more significant-sounding meatspace/emotional threads, nothing's stopping you from posting "IJAM: The feeling after a good date", "IJBM: That Guy at protests" or about any new hobbies you might have picked up safe perhaps privacy concerns.
Yeh, the lack of diversity has really put its weight onto the forum, it's been quite a while that you can't rely on finding something interesting about things other than video games or anime in a day's worth of posts. It's always been like this to some extent, but nowadays it's pretty dull.
I guess it was bound to happen with our nonexistent users influx.
I kinda miss the fact we've had more discussions about literature and our own attempts at writing 'n shizzle.
>get spammed by cold-call FB account recruiting for a CV website
>stock photo, tl;dr copypasta
>spam right back with making the non-profit I work at part of their Corporate Social Responsibility policy
I hope it's not a bot and I can actually try to recruit them for realzies.
^^ I never had anything good to say in them, but I miss the ones on making media in general.
^^ let me guess, that one time you got an e-mail from a Nigerian prince, he ended up paying for your business venture?
The issue is that in the past, we used to have more users that could sustain lifestyle threads or IJBMer Update discussions. Nowadays, non-anime or video game threads die off very quickly.
Related, it says something negative about the community that GamerGate is the only thing that can sustain a prolonged thread nowadays, and it's shouting opinions and links into the void for the most part. Perhaps IJBM needs e-drama to fuel itself, as I remember a significant portion of the lurkerbase was only interested in Chagen.
^^No, but I did save his soul through conversion:
^It's basically gossip intertwined with politics. It's about as low-tier in participation as you can get.
At this point there's not enough people to fuel some real drama, seems like.
No, you're fine. Above all, I want this place to be somewhere where people can openly speak about things, and that includes criticizing this place itself. And I'm happy to hear that your meatspace life is going well and being interesting and stuff.
I definiteliy agree that the forum doesn't have as much of a diverse or active presence as it did at certain points in the past. Though I think the question about what this forum means to each of us is not necessarily new. I remember bringing up several ideas for what to make this site, from a free-speech zone to a small hub for certain multiplayer games, or other ideas. And of course people early on debated to what extent we were defined by being a bunch of TVT "refugees".
That said, maybe the raison d'etre of this site really is, simply, a place to talk about stuff and to voice one's thoughts, and a place to turn to that's always going to be around. (I mean, I don't plan on taking it offline anytime soon.)
I'm happy the font of praise for MLP from the far-right hasn't run dry: http://thepracticalconservative.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/why-bronies-are-superior-to-the-neoreaction/
So, is there a genuine correlation with MLP watching and conservativeness, or are they just most notorious because of Bronies' ubiquity in the internet, plus the dissonant image such relationship presents?
The sheer size of the fandom means you have folks of all political stripes liking it and projecting their morals onto the show. You can find lefty articles whining about buffaloes and zebras and lefty articles praising it for showing a full spectrum of femininity without resorting to femme-bashing, and righty articles like the one above, plus righty articles whining about fandom degeneracy.
There might be fandom surveys out there gauging political stances, but I imagine it would skew pretty leftward.
How I know that I'm not feeling very attached to RWBY:
I never thought about putting it in a search query with "YTP" (until the idea was presented to me).
[user deleted]
Well, I just got around to catching up to it. I was two episodes behind.
Nah, I'm still sufficiently curious about it.
Unrelated:
Y'know something I like in stories?
The feeling that it's "organic". That it isn't just a story but a world.
There's a way to enjoy stories that feels very...well, "story-ish". But it's different. It's a lot more disconnected from the setting and the characters.
It's like, the "organic" or more "immersed" way is more like thinking of the characters as people and the setting as the world one is in, while the other way is more detached and is more like thinking of the characters as icons or pieces on a stage or in a sandbox.
Though it may be possible for a work to inspire both forms of enjoyment at the same time...
[user deleted]
Yeah, pretty much.
For what it's worth, right now I'm basically just reflecting on my experience with Madoka Magica. I think I was predominantly hoping (perhaps subconsciously) that it would be that first mode, what with people talking about how it was a deconstruction and all that. I guess I expected deconstruction to take something more closer to reality or something like that. Maybe. But then it turned out to be a lot more of the second.
Like, stuff just happened the first time I saw it. I developed attachments to the characters less on a first watch but more from subsequently thinking about them. And asking what they represented -- and getting no satisfactory answers, but just more questions about "what would I do if I were in their shoes?", which I couldn't really answer.
The story is definitely interesting, no doubt about it. Of course, it may or may not itself be commenting on this feeling of wanting to keep some mental distance from something traumatic. And then soon we get an endless recursion of being really meta, at which point I actually think I enjoyed that feeling from Haruhi more.
Oh well. I should go back to sleep.
Unrelated:
I'm sorry, I don't hate bronies.
I just don't care enough to do so.
I remember hearing that Urobuchi doesn't write characters so much as he writes ideas. It's definitely what you'd describe as "detached". It's probably a thing you have to keep in mind with any of his stories.
Hm, I see. That makes sense.
I was actually reading up about Madoka Magica on Wikipedia earlier and got that same impression. What with the stuff about deciding the role and fate of characters before designing them.
It's an interesting approach. Not the one I'd personally use when making a story. But not that there's anything wrong with it though -- allegory is a powerful thing, after all, and also something I appreciate.
(Personally I would ideally start with a setting, characters, and motives, and just let things run their course from there, perhaps tweaking details in order to lend the characters to interacting with each other. I feel that starting with a message or idea risks making my story feel "preachy", and so I feel that I need to be careful to justify everything that happens within the setting itself, if I really want a certain outcome, so that it feels that stuff isn't just happening for the sake of supporting a certain narrative. Of course, I usually actually start with specific ideas for events that I want to see happen. But anyway, that's just my opinion.)
@Naas_Human: are we doing a Madoka Magica avatar theme for halloween?