Quote from: JimBobOzWhat the FUCK?

Is this kind of praxis of contemporaneous roleplaying dialectic some kind of categorical imperative for you?

mereological essentialism? Mate, here's a mereological essentialism conundrum for you: if Calithena speaks in a way that everyone can understand him, if he loses his obscurity, is he still Calithena?

:forge:

English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?

:haw:

Calithena's one of my favourite posters anywhere, but that was hilarious.  

Especially imagining Samual L. Jackson saying it.

(Of course ... I am painfully aware that any one of my posts could easily -- and justifiably -- be subjected to an equal dose of abuse... :sweatdrop: )

Quote from: Elliot WilenPseudoephedrine,

Unfortunately, I agree with Sett. If I only like bananas and you only like apples, then we're never going to agree on what makes a good fruit in the abstract. If I ask you for banana advice probably the best you can do is refer me to the opinions of other banana-lovers.

Naw. You can persuade people. It's a different way of talking is all. People's tastes aren't intrinsic and enduring. Sometimes I want steak, sometimes I want an apple. Heck, tastes aren't even transparent to the person with the taste. I have a pal who is well-known (and loved) for getting people gifts that they love, but never would have imagined themselves loving. There's a kind of openness and sympathy between persons that's required, that's all.

QuoteAnother factor at play here is whether the variety of aesthetic frameworks which separate different gamers has the nature of strict categories, or if it's more fluid, like the "genres" that Brand Robins has talked about in his livejournal. If the former, an ultimate solution would be to break RPGing into separate hobbies...but if the latter, we're going to keep having problems as the fundamental criteria for "enjoyable roleplaying" could vary continuously, leading to "slippery slope" arguments.

That won't be a problem comrade. It's the situation we're already in, and we handle it just fine. The trick is just to not fall prey to the idea that clarifying the issue will solve all of our problems.

QuoteNaw. You can persuade people. It's a different way of talking is all. People's tastes aren't intrinsic and enduring. Sometimes I want steak, sometimes I want an apple. Heck, tastes aren't even transparent to the person with the taste. I have a pal who is well-known (and loved) for getting people gifts that they love, but never would have imagined themselves loving. There's a kind of openness and sympathy between persons that's required, that's all.

I think one of the greatest fallacies of internet discussion is the idea that all tastes are mutually exclusive.  

They aren't.  You can like both.  Really.  I'd go so far as to suggest being able to like both is far more healthy than a fanatic devotion to one taste over all others.

The Forge isn't a philosophy board, JimBob. And they're more tightly moderated than the rpgsite, so that kind of stuff wouldn't fly there.

Question to the moderators: just how loosely moderated is rpgsite? If one poster, call him "Calithena", were to tell another poster, call him, say, "JimBob", to go suck Cthulhu's great black pustulent oozing protuberance, would that be over some kind of line? Or can we do that sort of thing around here?

Sometimes it's even encouraged.

Quote from: CalithenaThe Forge isn't a philosophy board, JimBob. And they're more tightly moderated than the rpgsite, so that kind of stuff wouldn't fly there.

Still, it's a better fit than here, in the same way that my dad's 40" waist pants are a better fit on me than my girlfriend's panties. Of course, what you do in the privacy of your own home is no business of ours, except that we claim the right to laugh our arses off at you.

Quote from: CalithenaQuestion to the moderators: just how loosely moderated is rpgsite? If one poster, call him "Calithena", were to tell another poster, call him, say, "JimBob", to go suck Cthulhu's great black pustulent oozing protuberance, would that be over some kind of line? Or can we do that sort of thing around here?

Mate, that's well in-play around here.

It's only if you start following a person around from thread to thread poking at them that the mods start looking askance and thinking about doing their first non-spammer banning. And that's only because it takes the thread off-topic, which annoys everyone.

Insults are fine.

This isn't a philosophy forum, Calithena, it's a roleplaying forum. Speak plain English, if you want anybody besides Akrasia and Pseudoephedrine to read your posts - and if you only want to talk to them, use PM or email and save us the unpleasantness of finding epistemology on our monitor, like gum on our shoe.

Whatever excessive verbiage, dizzying circumlocution and abstruse congnition by means of a hermeneutic dialectic querying the dominant patriarchal materialist positivist paradigm you want to use, I can best it, both by matching it and reducing it to plain English to expose the irrelevance, banality or absurdity of the ideas trotted out. Or, we could just talk about roleplaying games. It's up to you.

Alternately, Settembrini could tie you down and force you to read Kant in the original German. Or even, God forbid, Focault in English. A cruel and unusual punishment? Without a doubt. I think there's a renditioned Afghan appealing to the US Supreme Court over that at this moment.

Ignore JimBob when he gets like this. He's appointed himself as unofficial topic police.

If you're having a conversation, have a conversation. If it's incredibly off topic, start a new thread (possibly in a new forum). If not, enjoy. You'll certainly get fewer responses when you start going on about dead people and what they thought about Life, The Universe, and Everything. But if that's what floats your boat, have at it.

Thanks, James.

JimBob, go fuck yourself. I'll talk about what I damn well please, in whatever argot seems appropriate to me. Which, fortunately, includes talking about roleplaying in English.

All these insults can't be helping the thread much either though, so that's all I've got, except for this brief note: if judgments about playstyle are judgments about what's likely conducive to happiness, and if happiness is the end of morality as well, then judgments about playstyle are in some sense moral judgments.

See now all that was in plain English, 'cept for that "argot" part - couldn't you just say, "slang"? Or if you wanted to appeal to the old codgers like me who played AD&D, "cant."

But overall, plain English. Good to see!

Aside from that, this,

Quote from: Calithenaif judgments about playstyle are judgments about what's likely conducive to happiness, and if happiness is the end of morality as well, then judgments about playstyle are in some sense moral judgments.

is really stretching the sense of "moral." Mainly because judgments about playstyle aren't judgments about "happiness", but about "what's fun at the game table." That's a different thing to happiness in general. If you're going to talk about happiness at the game table being basically the same as happiness in general, and that because of that talking about playstyle is moral talk, well then saying that I prefer Coke to Pepsi or brunettes to blondes is a "moral judgment".

You can't say that a playstyle is a moral issue without stretching the word "moral" so far that it can cover the whole fuckin' world.

As a matter of fact, I do think that every action we take in our lives has a moral dimension, but the post was in if-then land. However, I would definitely categorize "fun at the game table" as a form of happiness: a rare and wonderful form of happiness, love of which keeps me spending time talking to you all on RPG boards. And since I'm basically content equating morality with the greatest happiness for the greatest number, I suppose I disagree with your rebuttal. But damnit, I want to talk about vorpal blades and shit - I'm going to another thread.

Quote from: J ArcaneI think one of the greatest fallacies of internet discussion is the idea that all tastes are mutually exclusive.

I think somehow you're inferring that I said they were. I didn't intend to imply that--I was just giving an example of two people who happen to have exclusive tastes, to show how silly it would be for the two of them to try to relate them in a practical manner. (Oh, you could say all fruits have their excellence in their fruitiness or something, but it wouldn't really get us anywhere, would it?)

QuoteThey aren't.  You can like both.  Really.  I'd go so far as to suggest being able to like both is far more healthy than a fanatic devotion to one taste over all others.

Well, maybe--I mean, sure, it's nice to be able to enjoy both ballet and the rodeo, Ice Cube and Telemann--but I also think people should feel free to be themselves and not second-guess what turns them on and what doesn't. Fact is, for both economic and other reasons (like wanting to have people to play games with, or meeting some emotional need), there's often an element of self-interest involved in defining "quality" according to the benchmarks of one genre or another. Somebody out there desperately wants to convince me that, oh, Troy was a great movie. I'm sure somebody liked it, but not me, and part of participating in modern culture is making up my own mind and expressing my opinion of any creative work that I come across. Not to mention using my experiences and interactions with other "critics" as a guide to selecting and appreciating other works. Or indeed creating them.

So it comes down to which critics to listen to. Even if I like figure skating and baseball, there are important ways in which my enjoyment of the two is disjoint--I can't transfer the appreciation of one to critical analysis of the other. In the same fashion there's no reason for me to take advice on baseball from someone who only "gets" figure skating, and keeps arguing that the way to improve the game would be to have the umpires judge outs based on the fielders' form.

I've understood all that shit. I mean, I read it for fun and consider it pretty often.

It's just that, well, I don't really think it applies all that much.

I'm listening to Manfred Mann's Earth band in my underwear. I think I'm going to go take a dump, and for that I shall use Unisystem.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineNaw. You can persuade people. It's a different way of talking is all. People's tastes aren't intrinsic and enduring. Sometimes I want steak, sometimes I want an apple. Heck, tastes aren't even transparent to the person with the taste. I have a pal who is well-known (and loved) for getting people gifts that they love, but never would have imagined themselves loving. There's a kind of openness and sympathy between persons that's required, that's all.

We'll see. I don't mean to sound pessimistic. My experience though is colored very strongly by discussions of Theatrix on rec.games.frp.advocacy back around '94-'95, and modern discussions informed by Forge theory in recent years--where, in both cases, one side repeatedly pulled the "you don't really know what you're doing, or what you enjoy" card. Granted, sometimes the other party hadn't tried whatever it was that was being hyped, but when someone argues that X is exactly the same as Y in every way that matters, except that X is better than Y, there's a (perhaps unintentional) lack of sincerely trying to figure out what the other person would like, as opposed to what you would like them to like.

Quote from: ZalmoxisI'm listening to Manfred Mann's Earth band in my underwear. I think I'm going to go take a dump, and for that I shall use Unisystem.

Wouldn't toilet paper work better?