-
Announcements
-
Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
-
The Old Hack
-
Content count
5,594 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
356
Posts posted by The Old Hack
-
-
3 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:I wasn't going to mention my secret ship again.
What kind of ship would that be? A submarine?
-
4 hours ago, Scotty said:I don't think its the judging Tedd by masculine terms that's the issue, because Tedd's constantly swinging from one gender to the other. It's the fact that Edward doesn't know exactly what Tedd's going through and just making assumptions that's the issue, and it's really the fault of both parties that this is happening,
Excuse me? A genderfluid teenager with NO reference for what it is they are experiencing, and it is THEIR fault that they cannot explain what is happening to them? I am sorry. I could not possibly disagree more strongly.
-
2 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:I find harsh judgments on myself or others to be an impediment to fixing the less-than-perfect attitudes I've picked up. We all do the best we can today. We make amends for yesterdays when we were less than today as long as those amends makes the situation better.
My own judgments against myself have added much unneeded misery to my life.
Certainly so. But while I agree with you in principle that one should not judge oneself solely in order to punish oneself, that is not what I have been doing. I have been taking a long hard look at my life and realised that the very culture I grew up in is immensely racist and that this has had its inevitable effect on me. I am now fighting this and I refuse to employ weasel words while doing so. And in fact, it has been an immensely powerful tool for me to make progress. I take pride in this progress rather than allowing guilt to bog me down. And in fact, I found that once I admitted to myself how wrong my old behaviors were -- why, then guilt disappeared altogether, replaced by an intense desire to do better.
The opposite is more often the case, I am sad to say. I have met any number of people online who say "I am not really racist" while continuing to be so, the excuse being used to assuage the guilt they feel.
2 hours ago, Scotty said:I didn't see this after I made my previous post, but I feel I need to clarify a bit more because I don't want to appear to be defending Edward in this, but I have to wonder if Edward if even aware that what he says is wrong. Like you said yourself, you grew up surrounded by those behaviours and prejudices and it was later that you came to realized that they were wrong, Edward may not have reached that point yet because either he hasn't realized he's perpetrating these things or simply hasn't been told he's wrong, I don't believe that makes what he'd doing easier to forgive, but I wholeheartedly believe he needs to be made aware of his behaviour towards Tedd, either by Tedd or by someone close to Tedd that Edward couldn't ignore.
Of course the man isn't aware that what he is doing is wrong! He loves his son and has time and again demonstrated the lengths he will go to to aid and defend his loved ones. He got himself fired through the intensity of his feelings when Nanase and Ellen were endangered by Abraham. He would never dream of deliberately hurting Tedd -- which makes it just that much more tragic when you think about the pain he is unwittingly piling on the son he loves more than anything else in this world.
But he is nonetheless doing it. In this world, it is the results that ultimately count the most and good intentions in and of themselves are worth little when improperly guided.
1 hour ago, hkmaly said:While Mr Verres is unlikely to read this forum, personally I would assume people will be more likely to change their behaviour if you tell them that the action is transphobic than if you tell them THEY are transphobic. Which is the reason why I would use the "transphobic" label only for people who refused to change (or are actively resisting) and not for people who really don't know.
Racism and sexism are harder case, as people usually ARE aware of existence of other races and sex and while they may not know why some things are racist/sexists, there are plenty of stuff for which it's obvious.
That is of course your privilege. I disagree strenuously with it, however. I have a long history of calling a shovel for a shovel and there are times for diplomacy and times for presenting hard facts. We are not dealing directly with Mr. Verres in person and even if we were, different people respond in different ways to information.
Here and now, I stand by my choice of words. Mr. Verres is transphobic. That he cannot help himself is irrelevant when it comes to his actions and their consequences -- the pain inflicted on Tedd is not lessened by his lack of knowledge of the harm he is doing. When one is speaking of an injury, the intent behind inflicting it does not reduce the damage when it comes to the injury's effects and consequences. Tedd knows that his father is acting in a transphobic manner and as a consequence has lost trust in him. And this is truly tragic, but arguing about guilt or lack thereof will not in any way change Tedd's position and problems in this.
-
4 hours ago, Wildcat said:Transphobic is a very strong word, and I don't like using it for what may be just ignorance. (On the other hand, I'm of the opinion that actions can be transphobic/racist/sexist separately from the people doing them)
I understand your reluctance and sympathise with your desire to establish a demarcation. I simply do not agree with it. In part it is due to the way I judge myself: when I look back at my life, I can see clear patterns of how I have acted in ways variously racist, misogynistic, homophobic and ableist. And these behaviors were not due to ignorance alone. Much of them came from taught cultural behaviors and prejudices. I am working hard on them these days but simply knowing that they are wrong is not enough. Not only do I still slip up, I also have to constantly and actively watch for patterns of behavior I have never recognised before and sometimes only discover are harmful when someone victimised by them so informs me.
Was I racist, back then? In fact, was I all of these things? To my mind, yes. Without question. Trying to soothe myself into thinking that it was 'just ignorance' becomes a mere justification for my own actions, a palliative for my conscience that tells me that what I did wasn't so bad. The problem is that my actions were that bad. Keeping that in mind gives me motivation to work hard on improving and always be on the lookout for backsliding.
Therefore, yes. I judge Mr. Verres to be transphobic. This is not the same as saying that he is irredeemable. He is not, but it will take work from his side to overcome it and a lot of it. Trying to explain his behavior away as 'ignorance' is not enough: it assumes that simply informing him that what he is doing is wrong, and him understanding this, will be enough to set everything right. And it won't be. He has a lifetime of learned behavior to overcome, and he can't do that in a day or a week or even a year. It will be an ongoing process and it may take him the rest of his life.
I certainly expect this to be the case as far as my own learned behaviors go.
-
32 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:Agreed. This is one of those cases where the meaning of a word changes in different contexts. One can betray a trust without it being a deliberate betrayal.
Nonetheless. While I will concede the above, I have yet to be convinced that any of the mentioned characters have done anything like betray Mr. Verres' trust in them. The closest I have seen any of them come to that is Tedd who is deliberately withholding information about his own magic from his father -- and he has the massive provocation of his father's transphobia and numberless microaggressions against him.
-
30 minutes ago, Sjmcc13 said:As to stealing, half of the locations are unclaimed. If something is owned the color of its name and the prompt to steal changes in the HUD, pretty much everything is fair game, though allot is guarded by animals, ferals or raiders.
Is this like the chickens in Oblivion who could witness you committing murder and report you to the guards?
-
I have for a while now been doing my best to support a friend of mine who has been struggling with cancer. His prognosis was never good but he has fought long and hard for his life. Unfortunately, the latest news is that it has metastasized and spread to several other places in his body. Needless to say, this does not bode well. *sighs*
-
2 hours ago, Don Edwards said:A decently well-made gun in good condition being competently handled, the chance of that happening is negligible.
Unfortunately, it is not always a three for three in the real world -- or for that matter, in games. I could certainly envision a gun you loot off some bandit or mook being in an atrocious state of maintenance, for example. What is that term, a Saturday Night Special?
One of my own favourite comics about how to handle guns may be found in the first panel of this Grrl Power comic.
-
3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:That doesn't sound like very noble behavior. Were you playing a Jedi or a Scoundrel?
I have been accused of many, many foul things in my misspent life, but never of being noble.
-
2 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:Holy truth from time immemorable, or at least since the days of the avatar PLATO game and the Zork text adventure games. :-)
When I played KotOR my character would barge into apartments with the families living there present and go, "Scuse me, coming through, saving the galaxy, you don't need this do you, thank you very much!" as I looted the places for valuables.
-
28 minutes ago, partner555 said:I think it would be better to try kind words first before including a gun.
To be fair, this was the man who thought the St. Valentine's Day massacre was a perfectly normal and reasoned response to the policies of a competing business.
-
6 hours ago, Scotty said:Yeah, I can understand that, I just thought it was odd that Nanase being there wasn't a strong enough, I guess we can assume that Ellen weighed the pros and cons of it and felt that she was spending enough time with Nanase already and didn't want to make Nanase feel smothered?
That in combination with her desire to differentiate herself from Elliot might well do it, yes.
-
5 hours ago, Don Edwards said:If there's a page every MWF, then one month is at least 12 pages (most Februaries), usually 13 pages (most other months, plus a February about once every ten years on average - leap years where February begins on a comic-release day), and, twice a year on average, 14 pages (a 31-day month beginning on Monday or Wednesday).
It doesn't take much to make 13 pages take more than a month.
Yes. In this case, it resulted in a regular poster here to name a snippet of a storyline "Trapped in the Basement." The actual numbers kind of make me consider that an overreaction. I might have thought less about it if he hadn't also been so negative about it and constantly complained about the 'abysmal pacing' it showed. *sighs*
-
4 hours ago, Scotty said:Still, I would think that for someone who knows they are adopted, being told someone looks like them should trigger a "Do I have biological family nearby?". Of course Diane eventually did come to that realization, but it took a few more clues.
Denial is a powerful thing and both Susan and Diane reacted reflexively with it when initially hearing of their possible double.
-
3 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:Verres didn't extract a promise but he did set conditions and expectations.
"Don't betray my trust and keep the circle at 8. We'll be fine."
I still would like to see examples of Ellen, Nanase and Elliot actively violating that principle with malice aforethought rather than through teenage overconfidence and the pressure of circumstance. Until then, I personally will not accept the use of the verb 'betray.'
-
4 hours ago, Matoyak said:IIRC it lowers your speech checks, barter checks, and other such stuff. Makes it harder to accomplish things via smooth talk. (Though that may have been a mod?)
Well, that puts paid to Al Capone's claim that you can get more done with a kind word and a gun than you can get done with a kind word alone. o.o
-
2 hours ago, Sweveham said:I love the Philip K. Dick reference.
Philip K. Dick is very hard to get around when it comes to science fiction. You could say that many of his ideas are ubiquitous.
-
1 hour ago, Scotty said:Well I mentioned the reason for Elliot being lax in his preventing accidental transformations leading to someone finding out about him. But also he gave away the fact that he knew other people that had other abilities, his assumption that Ashley might have had a magic spell lead her to believe Elliot knew how common magic was.
In the case of Ellen and Nanase, I guess it'd be more Nanase's fault that Diane and Charlotte knew about the existence of magic because she wasn't very discreet about using magic in public. Ellen would be guilty by association in that case.
'Betrayal' is nonetheless a far too strong word to employ. At what point did Mr. Verres exact a promise from them to never tell anyone else about magic? He has urged them to be careful, yes, but that is not quite the same thing.
-
2 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:Wendy's did not have a huge international presence in 1984.
They may not have shown that commercial outside North America.
That would certainly have contributed to lessening its cultural impact. Of course, not all countries are civilised enough to have their own Pharaoh. Or pyramid land schemes.
-
1 hour ago, Scotty said:Justin's a special case, yeah Edward did imply that if Justin told anyone about the stuff that he know, it'd be bad. But Justin did ask if Edward would have to kill him for knowing too much so I wouldn't be surprised if Edward was just saying what he said to sound dramatic, but actually didn't really mean it.
As far as I can tell Justin's done better at not betraying Edward's trust than Ellen, Nanase and Elliot have.
Out of pure curiosity. How is Justin supposed to know whether Mr. Verres is being dramatic or not?
Also, please give examples of how Ellen, Nanase and Elliot have betrayed Edward's trust in them. I cannot offhand think of any.
-
1 hour ago, Sweveham said:Characters pointing their guns at each other willy-nilly is something that tends to annoy me in video games. If you are not going to use your gun, don't point it at something ( a rule that every reasonable user of guns follows). So it's nice to see Grace have a reasonable reaction to it in panel one.
SECONDED.
The very minimum that should be required of ANY gun owner should be knowledge of basic gun safety. And while I do not belong to the school that says that video games are the cause of all of today's violence, I do feel that it could improve the genre a lot as a whole if shooter games became more aware of this. Not necessarily to the degree of being sermonising -- but it would be nice if gun owning heroes got small reminders of the fact that it is not necessarily a good idea to wave your gun around like a bollocking toy.
-
Oh dear. That reminds me of a dream I had while attending university. I was just arriving for the day when I saw that people everywhere were busy carrying out all the furniture, books and computers. And they were replacing all of it with massive fish tanks. I am talking really big fish tanks, each of them almost a swimming pool in its own right. I watched in rising bewilderment and finally asked someone who was walking by, "What in the world is happening?" And he replied, "Well duh! It's exam time."
At that point I woke up. I have yet to be able to make sense of this dream.
-
25 minutes ago, ijuin said:Better than the Ex-Men.
A friend of mine once ran a superhero game where a team named the Ex-Men appeared. It consisted of a group of disgruntled divorcees of the superheroine Not Too Bright Phoenix. It developed that all the poor sods lived on the edge of financial ruin due to her alimony demands and we ended up feeling sorry for the idiots.
-
6 minutes ago, partner555 said:If its regular enough, there could be a certain sense of comfort in its predictability.
The perversity of the Universe does indeed tend towards a maximum. If we were to one day discover that this is not the case, it would result in a case of sociological upheaval not unlike the effect it would have on science and mathematics in general were the second law of thermodynamics to be disproven.
Story: Friday April 8, 2016
in Comic Discussion
Posted
In story time, Tedd has had maybe three or four days total to learn what he is, absorb it and cope with the shock. Are you really saying that this is enough time to prepare himself to go to the father he no longer trusts in this area and who has hurt him again and again?