On badass Orthodox Priests…

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Greek Orthodox religious people can be quite badass.

Greek Orthodox priest

Plutonick just posted a story about the dual-class Priest/Manager he saw at a recent wedding ((It’s in Greek btw)) he went to and reminded me of my sister’s wedding and the shenanigans that went on in there. I don’t think I ever posted about it and it was a good chance to outclass pluto so here goes.

At my sister’s marriage I had a fairly eccentric attire, wearing a bandanna, a sleeveless black shirt and a cape ((don’t judge me)) but as weird as it sounds, I wasn’t the most interesting thing to look at that day. You see, my brother-in-law has a fairly unique take on Greek Orthodoxy that I don’t quite understand. But anyway, that’s his own schtick so I don’t mind. However, their religious marriage also happened with people who shared the same unique style of belief.

The first sample was the best man. From what I understand, a quite “sinful” person in the past who had a total change of heart and became a hugely devout orthodox, even joining a monk coven for a bit (I think) and growing the archetypal epic beard. So during the Orthodox marriage ceremonies, one of the classic things happens, which is that a priest-helper sprinkles the family guests with holy water thrown from a special plant ((i.e. they have a pot of holy water in which they dip these plant leaves and then sprinkle the guests by flinging it in their direction)). So as the priest-helper was going along the line of guests sprinkling, he eventually reached this devout best man.

He sprinkle him once and moved on the row, but as he was returning for a second pass, the best man leaned in and whispered something to him. I visibly saw a look of terror and shock dawn on the priest-helper’s face. I cannot guess what the best man told him, but apparently it was terrifying enough so that the helper visibly avoided any contact in the future. Even eye-contact.

But that wasn’t the only thing that happened. If you think the best man was aggressive, it’s because I haven’t told you about the priest actually doing the ceremony yet.

As is traditional in these marriages, there was a hired photographer going around taking artistic photos. Generally these photographers are given some leeway in movement so that they can take the good shots from the front of the couple and so on. So the photographer was doing his job, which inadvertently meant that he had to move to and fro and pass between the couple and the priest.

Well, let’s just say the priest did not take this very kindly.

After the third time the photographer passed between couple and priest, the priest abruptly stopped the ceremony, leaned down and whispered aggressively and loud enough to be heard to the third row something to the extent of “If you walk between me and the couple one more time, this will be the last time you walk.”

After that, the priest went back to his ceremony as if nothing had happened, while the photographer cowered in the corner for a while and then continued taking pictures in a very…conservative manner. I couldn’t see my sister’s face, so I don’t know if she was as surprised as I was at this outburst but later she told me that the guy deserved it because he was being kind of disruptive anyway.

Needless to say, this was the most awesome wedding I’ve ever been to.

Well that's a first. A gaming community that actively opposes objectifying women

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The TF2 community shows more maturity than expected.

I came upon this thread on /r/gaming where someone thought that if more females played TF2, the class models would look like this:

Female models for TF2 that have been objectified with large bewbs and showing as much skin as possible.

Cringeworthy, I know.

So anyway, I went into the thread, expecting the usual privileged circlejerk that I would have to fight over to point out that the above art is extremely objectifying to womenm but I was pleasantly surprised when not only the top comment, but the majority of comments already made the same point.

I don’t if this says something about the TF2 community, or about reddit’s TF2 community but this is honestly the first time I’ve seen this happen. It’s usually the other way around, where I get downvoted to oblivion when pointing out that perhaps having all females dressed provocatively is just a tad sexist.

As weird as it seems, I think it has to do with the fact that the game didn’t have any official female models from Valve which would have been very likely to be dressed in skimpy outfits, simply because the original concept artist might not have given it a two second thought (anymore than they gave a thought to the idea that hey, maybe some of the characters should have been female). And from then on, it would have been an upward struggle to change the set perception where exposed cleavage, midriff and thighs should not the norm for females.

Now, that all the models are originally perceived as fully clothed, the expectations are different, leading in fact to fans creating empowered females when they try to create such models. Examples ((Unfortunately I don’t have direct link to the sources)) :

Lets hope that if Valve ever considers finally repressenting the other half of the human race in the game, they’ll go with such a design.

 

"The Rape" of Mr. Smith

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The Shit Reddit Says….

I found this little gem via reddit, when someone was trying to equate being the situation of being robbed to being raped.

Quoted here in verbatim

“Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of 16th & Locust?”
“Yes.”
“Did you struggle with the robber?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He was armed.”
“Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than
to resist?”
“Yes.”
“Did you scream? Cry out?”
“No. I was afraid.”
“I see. Have you ever been held up before?”
“No.”
“Have you ever given money away?”
“Yes, of course –”
“And did you do so willingly?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, let’s put it like this, Mr. Smith. You’ve given away money in the
past — in fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can
we be sure that you weren’t _contriving_ to have your money taken away
from you by force?”
“Listen, if I wanted –”
“Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?”
“About 11 p.m.”
“You were out on the streets at 11 p.m.? Doing what?”
“Just walking.”
“Just walking? You know that it’s dangerous being out on the street that
late at night. Weren’t you aware that you could have been held up?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?”
“Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.”
“An _expensive_ suit?”
“Well — yes.”
“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at
night in a suit that practically _advertised_ the fact that you might be
a good target for some easy money, isn’t that so? I mean, if we didn’t
know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think you were _asking_ for this to
happen, mightn’t we?”
“Look, can’t we talk about the past history of the guy who _did_ this to
me?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Smith. I don’t think you would want to violate his
rights, now, would you?”

Bonus link: See here how funny reddit’s /r/gaming finds pedo rape, and what happens when I call them out on it.

Quote of the day: The Anomaly of an mostly-female cast

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The Double Standards of a gender-skewed society.

Quoth Sarah Morayati (found in TV Tropes)

“If a smash hit has mostly male characters, nobody raises an eyebrow, but if it has mostly female characters, it’s a Great Big Anomaly worth several trees’ worth of shocked speculation.”

What also usually happens is that a movie with a primarily female cast is going to be considered a “chick flick” by many, while movies where there’s at best a token female are considered simply as “Action Movies”, “Adventures”, “Comedies” and so on, rather than “Dude flicks”.

A Gamer's Stockholm Syndrome

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Sony is being targetted yet again, and the community of /r/gaming falls over each other to prove who’s the biggest tool.

So, over at /r/gaming, reddit gamers have got their panties up in a bunch once they heard the news that a pseudonymous hacking group is planning to assault Sony once more.Apparently gamers are none too happy that someone is assaulting their preferred corporation and they are under the impression that any downtime as a result of those hacks, will be solely the fault of those dirty hackers. Some have even taken it one step further, laying the blame for any potential erosion of internet freedoms (as a result of corporate lobbying and media fearmongering) on the hackers as well.

The whole discussion is littered with playstation gamers who are outraged, OUTRAGED, that they may have to suffer more downtime on their precious online gaming as a result of a possible new breach of Sony systems. The amount of corporate suckup-ery is disgusting.

However, any possible downtimes or erosion of civil rights is not the hacker’s fault.

One has to consider, who brought down PSN the last time. It wasn’t the ones who cracked themselves into the system and it wasn’t a denial of service attack. If was Sony itself who did it, as a reaction to their system becoming compromised. I doubt that the original crackers were politically motivated anyway but even if they were and finding user data was an unexpected freebie, the reaction of Sony was the fault of nobody but Sony. Had they encrypted their data, they wouldn’t have to take down PSN for everyone. It was a gross failing on their part of their lax security practices.

It was also Son’s fault because they explicitly poked the hornet’s nest. Nobody forced Sony to take away the otherOS which made the hacking community actively interested in hacking the PS3. Nobody forced Sony to start legally assaulting the hacking community. Nobody forced Sony to participate in political lobbying to erode internet freedoms. And while the previous crack might not have been a result of any of those, but rather an fortunate exploit for monetary reasons, the latest attempts seem to be pure retaliation meant to cause harm and lulz.

Basically, the hacking community seems to be sending Sony, and anyone else watching a message. “If you fuck with us, we’ll fuck your right back”. They don’t seem very aware of this, but it does look to me as a form of solidarity in the internet age. Remember that all this was caused by Sony going after a few individuals who cracked their system for their own benefit, causing no harm to Sony whatsoever.

Finally we need to remember that the reason Playstation users are being inconvenienced by downtime of PSN is again Sony’s fault. PSN is a walled garden if you remember. That means it’s centrally controlled and managed by Sony and alas, such are the faults of walled gardens. Had Sony allowed an open ecosystem, where PS3 machines could connect to the internet directly and used one of the many available means to play games online there as pioneered by PC gaming, then the downtime of PSN would have been unlikely to affect a lot of people. Had they allowed dedicated servers or direct connections, people would still be able to enjoy their games online. But centralization means that there’s a single and large point of failure. If you don’t want this to happen again, tell Sony to open their walled garden.

But of course the PS3 fanboys won’t do that because they’re incapable of thinking outside the box. In fact, I guarantee they’ll make excuses on why such a walled garden is not only reasonable for someone like Sony, but that it’s in fact better this way. It will be like someone defending the AOL network.

All that said, I’m not exactly agreeing with the direct action of those crackers. I’m not sure how effective they will be in the long run. At best, they might achieve that corporations might think twice from going after individual hackers and they might let more hacks to their system slide and perhaps be more open in their dealings in the future. But this actions has a chance to cause political backlash as well. The reaction of /r/gaming is typical in fact.

Could there have been a better way? I’m not sure and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but I can’t blame the hacking community from retaliating against an oppressive entity like a multinational corporation with a rich history of questionable actions, which put them in their target sights.

However to blame the kneejerk reactions of the one with a history of abuse, on the ones retaliating to them is very much akin to a Stockholm syndrome. It’s like a kidnap victim blaming their family for not procuring the demands fast enough and empathizing with their kidnapper who as a result had to cut one of their fingers.

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Apparently the LackeyCCG admins don't like competition.

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The mods of LackeyCCG apparently don’t like people knowing about alternatives to their program.

Now that my Doomtown plugin for OCTGN is at a very good level, I decided to go to the LackeyCCG fora to let any Doomtown enthusiasts that may be using the (frankly inferior) Doomtown plugin there, about the one I have created. I was cautious that this might not be good netiquette, but both systems and plugins are free and there’s no real competition between them. It’s not like either of them will lose money from someone preferring the other version.

Well apparently the mods of the board don’t see it this way. My reply here was deleted without notice, one assumes because someone got upset that I was promoting a “competing” card engine. This is shameful on the part of the LackeyCCG admins who should be looking to help the community have the best experience in card games, not try to hoard it to themselves.

I left another reply. Looking forward to have it deleted now…

EDIT: I was correct in my assumption that my comment was deleted because I posted a competing plugin. The main developer of Lackey sent me the following PM
You aren't allowed to discuss competing programs on my forum. If you have a suggestion for me to improve Lackey, please post the suggestion.

How did /r/anarchists started becoming interested in Anarchism?

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Anarchists on reddit explain how they reached their political position.

Anarchists on march 3/14 (LOC)
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I thought I’d point out a discussion going on in /r/anarchism where various subscribers explain what made them turn to this political theory. We’ve done one of these before, but it’s always interesting to see new stories.

This time we have more people who got radicalized by state violence.

Mayniac182:

I’ve said this quite a bit recently, but: police brutality. It was seeing students get beaten at the London protests that made me question the role of police, as well as realising how much money is spent protecting politicians who are no different than the ordinary person.

A lot of other expressed something similar to my coming out story, in that they were always ideologically anarchists but didn’t know it until they discovered the theory.

Nebula42:

It’s a bit complex but when I was younger my best friends were people of color but something bothered me. Their parents worked much harder than mine and longer yet they were poorer. It struck me as not equal and unfair so I sorta developed a rudimentary socialist idea from early on. Obviously I was a kid so it wasn’t anything impressive. I was pretty much a social democrat (although I labeled myself a liberal at the time). Around 2007 I became increasingly aware of how oppressive the government can be and sorta had a 2 month flirtation with Ron Paul until I realized that the ideology is tyrannical in it’s own sense. I wanted something that was anti government and anti capitalist to fit in with my views of inequality. Someone told me I was an anarchist around 2009ish and decided to explore it more. Read the philosophers..etc and pretty much had the same ideas that I developed on my own except a lot more refined. So here I am today!

And then others were affected by culture

Nondualbliss:

I’d say it was a combination of exposure to punk rock and academia. As a teenager, I was into Bad Religion and Propagandhi. I gravitated into more underground punk stuff that leaned quite left. Then majored in Sociology and learned about inequality on a global scale and read a lot of Marxist theory. Then a band I liked – Stanford Prison Experiment – included a 30 minute lecture by Noam Chomsky at the end of one of their albums, which lead me to his writings. For the past 15 years now, I’ve been reading up on Anarchist thought.

Apropos Chomsky; there’s quite a lot of people who were converted by Chomsky in there as well. Just shows how effective a popular anti-authoritarian/anti-imperialist face can be, even if they otherwise espouse some very contentious positions.

A game of Doomtown in action

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Managed to play a game of Doomtown on OCTGN and thought I’d share a nice screenshot of the game in action.

I just managed to finish my first Doomtown on OCTGN on the latest version ((I’d managed to play a few full games back on 0.2.7 or something and a few games where my opponent’s PC crashed in the middle of the game with recent versions)) with Eloi who is also a maintainer of games for OCTGN. In fact, the reason we started playing is because I found a way to create larger capital cards for Warhammer:Invasion ((OCTGN is limited at the moment in the sense that you can only have one size of cards.)) and I contacted him about it in case he wants to use it. I mentioned Doomtown and he was interested to try it, so we did.

Fortunately he had skype because otherwise my fingers would be raw from all the typing. As it is, I’m just really really thirsty from all that talking 🙂

So yeah, we did a learning session and it worked fabulously! So I wanted to share with all of you a screenshot I took as the game was nearing its end. I think it looks great.

 

I was playing Texas Rangers. He was playing my bicycle Sweetrock deck. MacNeil became an unstoppable beast!

So if any you out there manage to play a game and get into a nice situation, do take a screenshot and send it over for me. Maybe I can make a “best moments” gallery 😉