I think this advertisement concept would be more effective if the man became, say, twenty-five instead. In other words, still quite young and full of potential, but not actually losing something, or being rendered helpless by youth. The idea of him being turned into a little soldier by cryonics struck me as creepy.
tenshiko
Karma: 340
I think most decent people would be willing to go to some trouble to avoid taking pictures of salmon if British people politely asked this favor of them. If someone deliberately took lots of salmon photos and waved them in the Brits’ faces, I think it would be fair to say ey isn’t a nice person.
See, this is exactly where your analogy falls apart for me. The Muslims to whose behavior people are objecting in “everybody draw Muhammad” are not politely asking for the favor of avoiding creating images of Muhammad in future. They are approaching creators of existing images with serious threats of violence. In situations like the South Park incident, it seems quite distinct from the infliction of psychic pain in that—well, to blow another hole in the salmon analogy, does it mean that Americans should stop making television programs about how to cook salmon? So… yeah.
...What is your personal definition of God, given you claim to avoid an anthropomorphic version? One of deism? “Love”? I’m very curious. Not trying to mock, this is a genuine question.
In that case, couldn’t the meetups have a separate section? They get onto the main page by default, which I find abrasive to anyone not looking for them.
Yes—in fact, I did not even consider this aspect when I made that comment. My bare minimum standard for main as opposed to discussion is “would I actually link this to a friend, describing it as a helpful, reliable source of information?” (Other posts are helpful sources of information and discussions, but this is my lowest possible standard.) Furthermore, I personally think karma should be a reflection of the user’s impact on the site, not the impact on the site of the awesome blogs that the user follows.
On a related note, I’m also against meetup threads being on the main page, though I haven’t had opportunity to mention that before as I feel it would be destructive to mention it on any given meetup page. Those are often not viewed by the majority of the site to whom the meetup location makes the post irrelevant, and it’d just kill the meetup mood for me to flame about them “not deserving” a place on main. It gets ridiculous when half the front page is meetups. Posts like “How to be Happy” and “Being a Teacher” should be the first thing visitors see, not just external links and the sixteenth freaky meatosphere interaction this week, especially since there are editors so caution in spam prevention shouldn’t be an issue.
I’d prefer to see this in discussion, as it’s pretty much just a link to a post somewhere else with no significant insight or analysis.
For the record, the “strangeness” of my responses around that time was really more my rather frantic recognition that, oh god, oh god, the alliance structure with Russia is falling apart, I have nowhere left to go, who will I be able to call dearest and darling now, France is a sweetheart but it’s ~not the same~ not to mention that it would be impossible for him and I to actually work together in any meaningful fashion. So I was trying to… transition into the end of the alliance with you smoothly? I don’t even know. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, one of my key problems in this game was/is a reluctance to properly lie. So basically I didn’t want to say “yeaaaaaah stabbing you now sorry baby” but I wanted to have meaningful conversations about strategy because, really, you were much more pleasant to talk to than almost any other player in the game. England counteracted it with his actions, France was the chatspeaking one (not that I hold this against him! It has its uses in many contexts and I am perfectly prone to slip into it myself), Italy played angry birds and valued getting revenge against alliance-breakers more than supply centers, Turkey was eloquent and nice enough except for the inconvenience that he communicated solely through emails, and Austria never really talked to me except in rejection of the Anschluss.
I can’t speak for your motivations, but I do know that the main communication we had was you saying “Russia is a rising force and you must unite to defeat him and this is the right thing to do”, and I was highly put off about how you seemed to be saying this solely to get us to fight him for you, instead of actually taking action against him yourself. Yes, this had the justification of how you can’t just go fighting him right away with no support, but it did leave a very bad taste in my mouth.
What I can say is that by 1904, my main communications were “stab Russia kthx” from France, rare “stab Russia kthx” from you, eloquent “stab Russia kthx” from Italy, and “hi there bb how’s it going here’s some useful information and discussion” from Russia. Regardless of how he was playing me, it at least felt nicer than when England was playing me (seriously, he needs to get back home and explain himself because what was he even doing) and was actually benefitting him, unlike England’s actions.
You WERE trying to defend me at various points, I’ll give you that. The thing was that you tried to do this without actually getting properly involved in Western affairs or taking any actions that would directly lead to a specific alliance structure. Granted, given your position this is very hard.
I suppose this is a good place to mention that I totally offered Austria an Anschluss, which he very, very rudely (not to mention foolishly) refused.
That was coordinated to give me a more advantageous position from which to attack you, which would have been helpful if England had actually been willing to do any damn attacking. I have no idea why he supported the incorrect unit; I don’t remember if I told him incorrectly at one point or if his finger slipped, and don’t really feel like going back and checking. (...oh my god his comments about the finger slipping make so much more sense now.)
That would be somewhat congruent with his attitudes (generally losing enthusiasm over the alliance between him and me over the course of the game). I’d really like to get him to come out and settle this, though.
Okay, here’s my version of the story. It is a rather depressing tale of a naive girl who really needs to consume much, much less Axis Powers Hetalia-related works.
At the outset, I made the rather simplistic decision that out of the three available alliances in the West, the Anglo-German one was clearly superior and the most long-term stable. So I told England this… and really could have almost heard the selfish champagne-popping that Richard Sharp describes when, for instance, your Austria proposes a Key Lepanto for you. I have this distinct aversion to unnecessary lying in Diplomacy (in fact, I don’t think I really misled significantly anyone in the entire game, that was probably one of my great mistakes) so I was rather open about this with France. Demanded Belgium for England, which was very nice of me and which probably made it much worse for me when things went sour later.
From there England proposed a rather bizaare strategy of making France think that we were fighting each other and make us think we were fighting France and basically it was apparently a very complex justification for claiming to be in an alliance with me and France at the same time. I’m very curious as to which he viewed as his true ally. (Obviously, Alex has stated he thought it was him; I was under the impression it was me at the time, but am leaning towards him given how things turned out.)
Eventually things started to tilt rather inevitably towards England’s decline, considering how he was really playing in a rather incompetent, casual matter, having quite significant professional commitment outside of the game. It was around this time that my constant exchange of information with Russia solidified into something of an actual alliance? I liked having him around, anyway, and had a general preference for a plan where he stuck around.
Unfortunately, it was also around this time that some situation I didn’t really understand significantly at the time came about in the east which meant Turkey would send frequent whining emails to the Western powers about how we had to ~unite~ to ~stop Russia~. And then I was approached by Italy, who had this strange obsession with ~justice~ and was also kind of a sweet guy. I defended Russia mostly for having been the only person to really help me with a straight face at all in the whole game. The retreat to Munich was coordinated, however, and I reluctantly began to become an actor in Russia’s defeat.
...and also around this time I seemed to have run out of chances. I had like two centers and, eventually, France and Russia saw what they needed in each other, however short-term they might need it, and came together against me. Kind of sad, really.
Here, have a written downvote because I think I’m running low on potential downvotes and don’t want to use one on you. Firstly, I would say that your bolded title doesn’t really provide as much of a description—you’re really saying more that you want to be a fast mind on a slow computer. And secondly… doesn’t that scenario make clear that you would be terribly lonely, if the way you were perceiving things remains the same? I’d much rather coexist with equally fast minds, which in this scenario would be quite likely.
D. Dying hurts. This isn’t necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it’s very weak.
Oddly enough, my boyfriend, who is the only person I’ve ever heard seriously attack abortion, uses this as one of his main arguments. According to some research (this was a verbal argument, and we allow each other not to provide citations in such a context) the neural architecture that allows humans to tolerate pain is not as sophisticated in developing fetuses, and so they are capable of feeling pain much more acutely.
Kin actually means gold/metal, so it would mean “gold child”, so golden girl! That would be adorable!
I’m obligated to point out the intrinsic risk of this way of thinking, as the uneducated can mistake the less common masculine suffix -hiko for a regular -ko. This is really the reason why romanization is such a travesty; none of this would have happened in beautiful kanji...
Ahahahahahahaha where do you live take me with you now. The last time I checked, northern Virginia qualified as the Northeast and the Metro is the only thing like that for miles and miles.
Don’t sweat about it, although I have to say this is the first time that’s actually happened to me personally on the Internet, sticking mostly to venues where there’s a genre field or areas that are female-dominated, like FF.net and Livejournal.
The funny thing is that tenshiko is a distinctly feminine name in Moonspeak, meaning most literally heaven-messenger-child, more figuratively “angel girl” (the suffix for child is used in the modern era exclusively for girls). I figured if beizutsukai is thrown around here with its ridiculous claimed pronunciation of “beiztskai”, I can justify using a trendily translated version of my name as an alias.
No, this problem is completely different from the stag hunt. This is because any individual tenshiko would prefer to spend her time doing something else and will only regret her decision if she can’t convince any of the later tenshikos to make up for her. A stag hunt would be deciding to participate in a high-reward extracurricular activity, like the drama club—if one tenshiko defects, there’s a significant cost, but if everyone defected then at least there’d be a uniform gain among all selves of more free time.
No, I meant the former. The fact is that in many environments, including my own, there is a huge difference between the amount of individuals who experience same-sex attraction and the individuals who publicly acknowledge that they do. I have previously tried just asking out girls that I like, but am inevitably rebuffed because, as was inevitable, they are straight. This has a greater cost than simply not getting to be in a relationship with them; there is actually often a negative effect on our (potential or already existent) friendship, as well as the disappointment I feel having already expended significant energy on sentimentalizing the concept of being in a relationship with them. Hence I would prefer to identify potential girlfriends before the sentimentalization and disappointment.
The frustrating thing about the former is that even the members of the local gay-straight alliance are close-lipped on the matter. (I only know of one closeted transsexual and two closeted bisexuals among their membership despite general alternative lifestyle and fashion signalling mechanisms common among the group.) There’s really no reliable signalling going on at all—I am in fact aware of a young woman who dressed up as a fairy for homecoming week and has been seen multiple times wearing a T-shirt stating that “All the cool girls are lesbians”, but was evasive when I questioned her sexuality, claiming that she merely bought the shirt because it was on sale at a store.
I think the downvotes come from how it might be difficult to implement, especially with the current hacked-together state of this website.