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Foxwarrior
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Publishing PDFs on DriveThruRPG to have them sell for you is relatively painless, they just take a full-sized publisher's cut and let you go on through.
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Post by Voss »

Really? Ouch. That's kind of bullshit for what little drivethru does to sell products. Bigger name stuff shows up in emails sometimes, and that's about it.
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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Ok, naming a character Medea for no apparent reason, I went with, particularly because I never had any interest in.... any of Tyler Perry's stuff.

But today, I saw this poster-
Image
(or a version of it)

I looked it up, intrigued by the possibility that there was going to be a movie featuring Medusa, and...

It's some Tyler Perry thing, that has nothing to do with Medusa, so far as I can tell.

Why the hell does Tyler Perry use names from greek myth and a creature from it on a completely non-fantasy movie's poster?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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Post by erik »

Image
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Foxwarrior
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Post by Foxwarrior »

Voss wrote:Really? Ouch. That's kind of bullshit for what little drivethru does to sell products. Bigger name stuff shows up in emails sometimes, and that's about it.
Yeah, well, if it's good enough for Steam, it's good enough for DriveThruRPG.
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Post by Voss »

Foxwarrior wrote:
Voss wrote:Really? Ouch. That's kind of bullshit for what little drivethru does to sell products. Bigger name stuff shows up in emails sometimes, and that's about it.
Yeah, well, if it's good enough for Steam, it's good enough for DriveThruRPG.
Not sure what you mean. Steam incessantly tries to foist terrible indie shit on me.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Prak wrote:Ok, naming a character Medea for no apparent reason, I went with, particularly because I never had any interest in.... any of Tyler Perry's stuff.

But today, I saw this poster-
Image
(or a version of it)

I looked it up, intrigued by the possibility that there was going to be a movie featuring Medusa, and...

It's some Tyler Perry thing, that has nothing to do with Medusa, so far as I can tell.

Why the hell does Tyler Perry use names from greek myth and a creature from it on a completely non-fantasy movie's poster?
Madea isn't from greek myth. The first vowel is an important distinction. Madea is a slurring of My Dear. (My Dear becomes Ma Dear becomes Madear becomes Madea).


As for Acrimony, well have you seen the trailer? It's a pretty good metaphor.
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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I lost some weight a bit too fast and I'm getting hanging skin everywhere. I don't suppose there's something I can do other than get it cut out, is there?
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I lost some weight a bit too fast and I'm getting hanging skin everywhere. I don't suppose there's something I can do other than get it cut out, is there?
You can promote skin elasticity by drinking more water and eating more collagen and elastin: milk, beans, seeds, nuts, fish.
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Post by Maj »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I lost some weight a bit too fast and I'm getting hanging skin everywhere. I don't suppose there's something I can do other than get it cut out, is there?
You can promote skin elasticity by drinking more water and eating more collagen and elastin: milk, beans, seeds, nuts, fish.
A better source of collagen and elastin is from soup made from meat bones. It's from connective tissue in animals, so the chance of it being in any of the foods you mention besides the fish is pretty much zero, and the fish is questionable because it's not like we eat a fish's connective tissues often.

Or just get a supplement.
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Post by Nachtigallerator »

The entire idea that collagen and elastin survive your stomach acids and digestive enzymes is absurd, no matter what food you eat to acquire them. Stuff you eat has to move into your blood to be useful to the body, so it needs to be degraded down from the molecules you would call collagen, which are huge.

And while you could argue that that would at least provide your body with the raw materials to make new collagen, the problem with skin flaps is not that you don't have enough collagen or elastin, nor is your body lacking the materials to make it's own collagen and elastin. Skin you have grown is skin you have grown - there is no bodily process that registers how tight your skin is and periodically removes extra cells, and subcutis isn't a coherent band under the skin that can somehow pull it tighter. I don't know how people imagine that would work, but if you can't tighten it by hand without removing some of it, how exactly would your body do that?


You'll need to have surgery done to get rid of these flaps, full stop.
Last edited by Nachtigallerator on Fri Nov 03, 2017 11:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Starmaker »

#2 here
Dear Americans,
do you actually have freeform loan applications?

whyyyyyy
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Post by deaddmwalking »

My reading of the article was that this was based on peer-to-peer loans. Basically I go and ask people at this website to give me money for 'good reasons' and people that agree offer the money. Sort of like Kickstarter for loans... But I didn't look into it further.
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Post by Starmaker »

Ah I see. It's weird, then, that only 13% default.

Also, since individual unsupervised humans are making decisions, bad study is bad - no control for if people who appealed to emotions defaulted more because more lenders were willing to lend to risky borrowers if the appeal was emotional enough out of charitable feelings.
Last edited by Starmaker on Sat Nov 11, 2017 7:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Stahlseele »

There are so many intelligent and so many smart people here, there are bound to be some good answers found to this most vexing of circumstances:

Why is the milk always gone before the cookies?
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Stahlseele wrote:Why is the milk always gone before the cookies?
You don't have to chew milk.
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Red Archon
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Post by Red Archon »

Why is it important to protect indigenous peoples from assimilation to the cultures of the invaders? As in, I understand assimilating immigrants, but don't follow the logic of not doing that with peoples whose homelands have been occupied.

And I'm not talking about forced assimilation, I'm talking about going out of your way to not make an indigenous population part of the larger nation.
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Post by Chamomile »

A few potentially good reasons leap out at me upon first consideration. First, if the culture is assimilated in its own homeland, it will cease to exist, and there's academic and cultural value in keeping the old culture extant. Second, there's a question of exactly how voluntary the assimilation is, particularly as occupying cultures likely have more wealth and power and getting access to that wealth and power is probably much easier if you assimilate than if you continue worshiping your obscure indigenous New Zealand fertility cult or whatever. Incentivizing natives to retain their original culture can help balance out the inherent incentives of assimilation and thus help guarantee that the only natives who assimilate will be the ones who, for whatever reason, really do dislike their native culture and/or like the occupying culture, regardless of what the monetary or influential benefits are.

And a dumb reason also leaps out at me, which is that activists might be continuing to fight a battle on auto-pilot without stopping to reassess whether it still makes any sense and if their efforts would best be focused on other issues or, God forbid, consolidating their victories.

I don't know if any of these are actually relevant to whatever specific situation you're thinking of, or if they're relevant to any situation, so I'm basically just thinking aloud right now.
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Post by tussock »

NZ is probably a good case study.

Official government policy up to WWII at least was Māori were going extinct before European settlement and were "saved" by the colonial government, their culture was central to blame for their pending extinction and Māori would be encouraged to adopt proper British culture in order to save them from themselves.

In reality, Māori were undergoing a slow but steady increase in population and technology as they recovered from a tsunami in ~1500 that is estimated to have killed almost all of the seaboard population of the country at the time, and wiped out all knowledge of shipbuilding and a few other coastal-based occupations which had provided most of the trade and a lot of the food up to that point. They'd recovered a lot of it through archaeology, digging up and fishing up parts of old wrecked ships and reverse-engineering stuff.

But they, being humans, adapted very quickly to new tech. Soon after the first colonies set up, Māori were trading throughout the southern pacific under the "United Tribes of New Zealand" flag, and Māori cheifs had sailed to England to personally petition the Queen to keep her fucking people on a tighter leash, but the lies of the settler government won out, most land was stolen by acts of a ludicrously unrepresentative settler parliament, and the Imperial British army was sent in to crush any resistance, which it mostly did by raiding and destroying food stores when Māori refused to fight pitched battles against them, causing starvation and disease. Every battle won by Māori simply resulted in more punitive laws, more land theft, and more Imperial troops arriving. Eventually the survivors surrendered, except for a couple tribes the British army refused to take on.

By the mid 20th century, the old settler government lies had become official history, and Māori children had to write that shit into their tests or be beaten in front of the class for getting it wrong. Speaking Te Reo in school was likewise a beating. Most Māori tried to shield their kids from their own culture, to avoid that, to not speak their own language at home or tell their kids the truth about what it was like under the early settler government, to protect them. It wasn't racist of course, white kids were also beaten if they spoke Te Reo in school.

And the reality of life for assimilated Māori was the lowest paying jobs, with the least job security, massive under-funding of healthcare and education and basically any and all public services in areas where Māori were concentrated, which was never recorded in official statistics until the 1980's because that was just poverty and had nothing to do with race, because New Zealand officially was not racist. Still not racist, even though that's obviously, there's nothing serious been done to fix that so it's still true.

Eventually it got better though. Historians looked at the evidence, proved their theories with working models, dug through the oldest archives from here and abroad, got the real story out, the government eventually created a special court to redress past wrongs, and let Māori run schools entirely in Te Reo, and fixed all the old history stuff so that it agreed with the evidence instead of the settler government of over a century previous.

And it turned out that's better than that whole thing where people were "encouraged" to assimilate. There's Māori can't speak any more Te Reo than I can, and there's white kids can speak it fine. There's more wealthy Māori, though the averages are still a product of the past. The history is still being uncovered, a lot of the settlers it turns out were very shooty people, a lot of the old stories about warfare between the tribes, it turns out private British companies didn't just sell arms to one side, and ship them to the other side's home, but also took the loot as payment, and in fact made such raids a condition of sale, which, you know, is really just a private British company looting NZ for the cost of a few hand guns and brown people's lives.


Basically, settlers are impossibly horrible fucks who wreck everything and blame the locals for all their problems. Asking the locals to adapt that world-view is extremely perverse. It's like asking why rape victims don't just marry the bloke and get on with life.
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Post by Red Archon »

Me being a Finn, I obviously look at the Sámi people, who live in the Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish and Russian Lappland and are in fact the only indigenous people within the EU. We've (well, the Scandinavians and Finns) made great strides in the last 20 years to stop outright discrimination and cultural imperialism (the sorts of stuff tussock describes) against the Sámi people, which is great, but still a work in progress. And I do understand preserving the language and culture.

But in Finland at least, both the Sámi people and the industrial grade liberal left, of which I'm gladly a part of, are rallying to create a sort of reservation, with bizarre and uncharacteristic racist undertones (pure Sámi blood type of thing) to stop even the slightest possibility of integration. Why are hardcore liberal leftists so bent on creating a racially pure autonomous area without any prospect of ever becoming economically independent in the barren north? I know we, the Western (or in this case, Southern) civilization ruined the Sámi way of life (as it turns out, in 2017 your nation cannot survive with early bronze age technology), but is the goal here simply some sort of reparation? What's wrong with the people just slowly becoming part of the larger nation, which is essentially what happens to every culture?

I'm asking you, because perhaps someone from the US could give me some sort of insight, what with the Native American situation.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Why should cultures assimilate? You follow the law, pay your taxes and vote, why should you be forced, encouraged or otherwise made to act like someone else?

Now, if there's no forces pressuring people to change, I don't see any particular reason to try and resist that, cultures change naturally over time. But a lot of people want to stamp down on other people's lives, and that should be resisted.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Why they should assimilate? Xenophobia, Racism.
Look at the whole Islam Honourkillings and Sharia Law stuff for example.
Assimilation, homogenization, it leads to peace between neighbours.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Sun Dec 17, 2017 1:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

Xenophobia and racism keep people from assimilation on both sides, my guy. If minorities can do the same stuff and get the same jobs and eat the same sandwiches as the majority, they're less likely to refuse the collective and stew in their own xenophobic hatred.

Some are, since xenophobic hatred is their stock in trade (the specific Religious Right bloc in America, Wahabbists who stir violence at home and abroad), but there are always iconoclasts. The purpose of assimilation is to mitigate or outright prevent those iconoclasts from being anything more than fringe wackos. Assimilation as in "adopt our culture or else" tends to do the opposite unless the minority group is too weak to mount a threat. Hell, even the belief this is happening in a group that normally has power creates iconoclasm; look at the folks who got Pepe the Frog considered a hate symbol.
Last edited by Mask_De_H on Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Maj »

It seems to me that we do have this problem... In trying to preserve a culture, we don't decide what aspects of a culture need to be preserved. We want it frozen at the point of "contact" (so to speak). And personally, I don't think that's even humane.

In this world of technology and innovation, we have made important strides in medicine, heating/cooling, communication, transportation, etc. Culture evolves. But peoples should be given the choice to integrate those into their culture the way they need to.

Not everything is hunky dory around here (Western Washington, west side of Puget Sound), but the Native Americans in the region still build their longhouses - just out of modern materials. On a number of rivers and streams, they have taken over wildlife management because their traditional methods are superior to what we've been doing, but they use modern technology and construction to do it (building weirs, etc) . They use modern fishing equipment most of the time, but the first run of the salmon season, they hold their traditional fishing ceremony. They walk around with cell phones and big box store clothes like other people do.

But their reservations usually have a casino acting as a battery to power modern clinics and amenities, along with cultural centers and museums. They host a lot of community events for everyone - everything from Christmas bazaars to conferences on ecology. They have restaurants that highlight the cuisine of the Pacific Northwest, and combine their traditional foods with modern cooking methods and foods that might be out of season. Signs are often bilingual.

One of our tribes (we have two in our county) has no people living on their most important tribal land - they chose not to live there because it was too remote (it was an island with poor access). They have purchased a large quantity of mainland and have the headquarters of their tribe there. The island is still used all the time, just no one lives on it.

The other tribe has had nothing but difficulties with encroachment. They have fought the state (and often won) to restore their land (and rights) which has been crushed by businesses and power companies (and the state). Things like the destruction of the estuary where the tribe harvested the reeds that they made their traditional baskets with, led to the decline of their traditional basket weaving. They've really had to fight to get it back. It doesn't help that half the tribal land floods constantly - their river is always the first to flood whenever it rains. Winter is basically a constant flood warning.

Last year, in third grade, my son learned about the history of the area from the white perspective. And then the kids went back to the beginning and learned about it from the Native perspective. I think that was really good for the kids and our area in general.
Last edited by Maj on Sun Dec 17, 2017 7:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Shrapnel »

Okay, so I recently got a Gundam model kit, because I like making models and Transformers aren't the only giant robots that I like. This model, however, had a part that is about a quarter the size of an atom and is translucent, and, because my life is soooo awesome, that part of course fell out of my fingers into the couch and disappeared into the ether. So, my question is: Is there some place I can go to order/buy individual parts of a model kit? I don't want to have to buy a second model just to replace one piece.
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