Signtist

It’s more like you need to play a couple sessions with people explaining your options every step of the way, mostly in battle, until you can start playing a basic character on your own, then branch out from there.

My first character was “guy with bow.” I don’t remember his name because it wasn’t important - if we were in combat, I shot my bow. Anywhere else I stood around waiting for combat to start so I could shoot my bow. Eventually I got a handle on my skills, and I figured out what types of shots to make when, but for a good long time it was just 'I shoot my bow."

Once I got a good understanding of how combat worked, and I had watched my new party members handle some of the out-of-battle stuff, I got better at thinking of new ways to play my character, and sussing out how much I could step away from the rules as written to do things that would make sense for my character.

I remember the first time I decided to shoot down a chandelier on the enemy instead of just shooting them directly. The DM rewarded my ingenuity by pinning the enemy down under the chandelier, allowing us to finish him off quickly. That was when I first started really thinking in terms of what I could do, rather than what I’m allowed to do, the way video games taught me.

Nowadays all my characters are varied and unique, with interesting backstories and a mix of in-battle and out-of-battle skills, and I do my best to play then as real people rather than bundles of stats, but that would’ve been way too much for me as a newbie, so it was better that I just focus on getting the combat down at first.

All of this was facilitated by a good party and a patient DM, though. When starting out, your first priority is to find a group that you mesh will with, and who are willing to help explain the basics until you’re ready. Finding such a group is invaluable for a new roleplayer, and I wish you good luck finding yours!

That boy’s name? Ozzy Osbourne.

From what I can tell, the guy has a figure that shows 12% data center approval rating, which he uploads to the cloud, which is housed in a data center. However, when he downloads it again later, he finds that the figure has been modified to now show 98% data center approval rating instead. This was presumably done by the data center in an effort to manipulate people into believing data centers are popular.

People will fight you tooth and nail to prevent something they view as immediately threatening to them. On the other hand, they’ll pay you to implement something they view as immediately useful to them. In either case, they don’t care at all about any non-immediate repercussions for anything.

They were filmed saying exactly this back in January/February.

Trailer parks are stereotypical places to get hit by tornadoes. Tornadoes don’t hit trailer parks more often than anywhere else, but since trailer parks are often wide open spaces with few trees to break up the wind, and a lot of loosely-secured objects to become projectiles, they’re often hit hard enough for the news to do a story on it, thus perpetuating the stereotype.

The joke is that since we’ve just determined that dinosaurs die from tornadoes, we should look for fossils in the stereotypical tornado place. For comedic effect it overlooks the fact that trailer parks are cleared of trees and filled with clutter by humans, so the locations wouldn’t be any more likely to have dead dinosaurs - even those killed by tornado - than anywhere else.

My guess is that it’s just waking up from being under anesthesia.

Oof, I appreciate the candidness. It’s true, I simply don’t fully understand everything you’re trying to convey at the moment, but I don’t doubt the validity of your argument.

I can at least say that I recognize that my current lack of understanding doesn’t mean I’m incapable of understanding; I’ll work on being more mindful about the questions I don’t immediately think to ask about things like this, and I’ll keep in mind that my interpretation of my own actions has some holes that I’ll need to fill before I can fully trust it.

Thanks again for taking the time to educate me - I know the internet has all the information in the world, but I still think the best way to learn about interpersonal stuff is to ask a real person.

Thanks for the rundown! I think I understand a little, at least about the lack of general cultural consideration of consent, but I’m not certain about what specifically pushes this meme over the line into problematic territory.

Would be be fair to say that the issue with this particular meme is that we shouldn’t assume they are in a relationship? I certainly believe it was implied, but it’s true that there’s nothing outright stating that he’s not looking at some unknown woman as she sleeps, which would certainly be rapey. Or is okay that we assume that they’re in a relationship, and the issue is that being aroused while looking at someone, even someone who accepts your attraction to them, is inherently objectifying, and while that can be acceptable, it should never be assumed to be acceptable without express consent being given in the presence of the observer?

Or is the issue here not with the meme itself, but the simple fact that not enough people outwardly asked the question of whether consent was present, even if after more consideration it likely would be? Like, I want to assume the best in people, and I know that even just questioning if someone might be evil can drastically impact the personal and public perception of them, so I don’t want to walk around assuming the worst of any given scenario, but I also don’t want to overstep into territory that’s going to make someone uncomfortable past the normal amount of discomfort everyone has to put up with that’s just inherent to interpersonal communication.

The more I think about it the more I think it’s just about keeping consent in mind, even if there’s no clear “right” answer, even for a specific given scenario, but it’s hard to make that into an actionable plan for change that isn’t just always being pessimistic about human nature. Like, even though I know it’s not meant to be, the act of asking for consent is essentially the act of asking if someone is doing something wrong. It’s fine when it’s between you and another person, but when it’s someone on the outside looking in, it’s hard to know when to ask, and when doing so is being too suspicious of someone who doesn’t deserve that. Maybe that’s wrong, though, and I’m hitting a wall of my own internalized misogyny… it’s tough.

So I’m not trying to argue, but I want to better understand what it means to objectify someone. Is this rapey because the SO isn’t consciously choosing to appear attractive? Is attraction to someone only acceptable if they are actively aware and desiring for such reception, even if you’re not otherwise interacting with them, and are in a relationship with them? It’s honestly not something I’ve thought about much when it comes to people in an existing comfortable relationship where consent is generally always present for normal interactions unless expressly revoked.

Like, when I look at my wife I think she’s attractive, often even moreseo when she’s not doing anything special to appear attractive. She seems to appreciate this, so I don’t believe it would be something bad, but I don’t really know. I know I would want her to feel the same way about me, but again, I suppose that very desire might be a form of consent that isn’t necessarily established in the meme. Is it rapey because we don’t specifically know that she wants to appear attractive to her SO? Is that not something we can at least assume in a relationship between 2 people we otherwise know nothing about?

Again, I’m just trying to better understand because it’s not something I’d considered before your comment. I can definitely understand someone wanting to be sure that consent is established, but I also know that when you’re in a relationship with someone for months/years, those conversations about consent fall away after you both know in and out what the other is okay with. Or are you saying that even that is too far, and it should always be discussed every time, even when full trust is established?

Nah, he had such a bad experience with it that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

I don’t know about you, but I view the acknowledgement that this moment will be a core memory for me moving forward to be one of the highest forms of enjoyment I can have. You can have that thought while simultaneously participating in the moment itself - it’s not an either/or thing.

I love it when that happens, because it’s like I got my wish - here I am living it.

It wasn’t a joke. This is literally how corrupt politics works. People become politicians specifically so that they can make a bunch of money from companies paying them to push the country more in their favor, and the people who don’t play into that game don’t make it high enough to do anything about it.

It’s Trump. Some car manufacturer exec gave him a few million to do this, since it’ll save them some money in the short term before they jump ship to another company, so he did it.

I thought it was a unique way of saying “piece of cake”

I remember when youtube first came out. Thinking it was some kind of online TV, I searched for “The Simpsons” and got no results besides a low-quality upload of The Bartman music video. I decided there wasn’t really anything there for me and I left, not returning until several years later when there was content there that I wanted to watch and couldn’t find on TV. Now I primarily watch youtube, and again I find myself not wanting to switch to peertube until there’s enough content there that I want to watch but can’t find on youtube.

Yeah, that definitely became the creator’s favorite way to stretch things out. The Wano arc had one big fight toward the end that went on for around 80 episodes… There were several different people fighting in different locations, but it was still way too long. I haven’t seen the “One Pace” edit that someone else brought up in this thread, but it sounds like it cut out a lot of that unnecessary filler.

That was near the start of Dressrosa, which was a pretty long arc with a lot of fight episodes that seemed to just be the same back and forth stalemate over and over again. It’s unfortunately just a few arcs before the Wano arc that does the same thing to an even greater extent, unfortunately. The filler was already starting to wear on me by that point, but those 2 arcs took it to an extreme. Luckily, it seems that the creator has realized this as well, and the arc after Wano is a nice quick pace with plenty of stuff going on.

I love it, but the length is certainly a hurdle. It took me years to get through the anime, and there were several points where it felt like it took multiple episodes to make even the most minor progress in the story. Still, though, the story itself is great, and it seems that recently things are back to the snappy pace that the beginning of the show used to have, at least where the dub leaves off.