Pattern Ghost

Can you be more specific? You asserted that "It would not have been too much to ask them to run the book by a few Asian people prior to publication.", and I showed you the list of Asian play testers. You asserted that "OA wasn't terrible, but it did have some tone deaf stereotyping and was particularly clumsy in its treatment of Asian culture." and I pointed out that it was largely by design, and the IMO much of what is complained about as stereotyping comes from Asian pop culture media of the era, and that Cook leaned more heavily on those sources than he did the more scholarly ones. I further pointed out that the scholarly sources were most likely more racist than the pop culture stuff. I simply answered your questions you posed. Am I a little cranky? Yeah. I don't like half-assed, ill-informed whining and my back has been out since Tuesday morning. So, I'm definitely cranky. If you're implying I'm racist, well, then we have a problem.

That's OK. You're probably saving yourself some brain cells in the process.

Ask and ye shall receive:

Source of the discourse. Edit:

I just bought a copy of OA from Drive Thru (super cheap -- they're having a Christmas in July sale!), and here's from the "Special thanks to" section: "To the Japanese players—Masataka Ohta, Akira Saito, Hiroyasu Kurose, Takafumi Sakurai, and Yuka Tate-ishi—for critiquing and improving the manuscript on short notice" As for the treatment of Asian culture, from Cook's introduction: "In preparing Oriental Adventures, there were many goals to meet. Foremost of these was the interesting but conflicting demands of historical accuracy and fantastic imagination. There is very little point in doing a book about Oriental culture if the material is not accurate. But accuracy can often be unplayable or just unacceptable. Accuracy here would mean stricter class structures, less chance for player advancement and less adventure. It would mean more fiddlely rules for little details that would get in the way of play. And rules that might apply to a Japanese culture would certainly be incorrect in a strict Chinese culture! Furthermore, the world presented had to be what people think the Orient is, not necessarily what it actually is. Thus, reference works and sources of ideas went beyond books and included popular Japanese movies about samurai and ninja, the whole family of Hong Kong kung-fu movies, comics, and even those endearing monster epics of giant reptiles and funny dinosaurs." In that last sentence, the "books" he was going on included (from earlier in the intro): "The second pleasure in writing this comes from the reading I had to do to prepare. The Oriental Adventures project spurred me to read materials I would otherwise never have seen. Some of it was thrilling and some not. The variety of topics was huge—legends, folktales, literary epics, genealogical histories, philosophy, religion, poetry, architecture, land management, government, history, martial arts, sociology, anthropology, military affairs, economics, and fiction. The bulk of this material deals with Japan, with China a close second. This is not due to any oversight. Most of the material available deals with Japan, through the choice of various writers. From the standpoint of gaming, Japan's history and culture provides greater opportunities for adventure and advancement. Although often seen as a rigid society, Japan has had several periods of tumultuous upheavel where a person of any rank could make his name—the Sengoku period or the collapse of the Heian government being only two. Of course, anyone who looks carefully at China will find the same occurred there. However, fewer people cared to write about it." Given the author's (and Cook was the sole author of the text of the book, the other two credited didn't contribute other than some Gygaxian spotlight hogging going on) own stated intent and methodology, I don't think we should take the thing as anything other than it was intended: A big old mashup of Asian stuff, with a heavy Japanese base flavor, the same way that the prior material was a mashup of European and Middle Eastern (or Near East, according to Gygax) stuff with a heavy Northern European base. Now, I don't know if there is any tone deaf stereotyping going on, but I don't think you can call out a white guy for using stereotypes he found in Asian fiction and cinema. Of course, those would be "tropes" and not "stereotypes" if we were talking about a Euro-centric setting . . . . I'm sorry, but the guy who spent 26 hours in a "deep read" on social media overlooking something as basic as the author's introduction to the material to try to call someone out seems more like attention whoring than any sort of legitimate complaint. Then again, maybe that guy calls out old Kurosawa movies too, but I doubt it. EDIT: The guy who started this claims to be an anthropologist, so it'd be interesting to see if he points out any of the inherent racism in Cook's more scholarly sources. To be fair, there's probably plenty more to be found on that side, than the pop culture references that form the framework for OA. The press and comments on it have only mentioned him calling out "three white guys" for being bunglingly racist, though. I'm not sure if I have the stomach to sit through 26 hours of podcasts, but I might check out a bit of it to be fair to the complainer.

Every fantasy fiction publisher pushes for non-Eurocentric settings in their submissions guidelines, and have been for at least the last 20+ years, but now WOTC has to put "sensitivity" disclaimers on OA, which was probably its most popular non-Eurocentric setting supplement? So, how do writers win these days? If you're a person of European descent and write about faux-medieval European settings, you're not inclusive. If you write about other cultures, you're a racist, or culturally appropriating, or whatever the newspeak of the day is. I don't remember anything particularly offensive about OA, though I haven't looked at it since '86. All I remember is the same pulling of a bunch of folklore from Asian cultures into a DnD mishmash, the same way the original DnD did with mostly European and Middle Eastern cultures the first time out. So, Faux-Europe is out and Faux-Asia is out. I guess they'll have to release a setting that's based on nobody and nothing from nowhere in the nowhen time period next.

Of course, there's a fair chance that Kavanaugh would actually rule the opposite way if the case came up. I'm pretty sure he was just saying whatever he thought he needed to say to get the seat.

I got tested today (Monday, just got up from nap). They used a regular qtip, not the brain tickler our ER uses. This appears to be a home kit. I hope it's accurate. Results will likely be slow since this was just a drive through testing place my work sent me to.

Howdy, work neighbor! (Though you're likely sleeping most of the time I'm at work.)

Well, I've been feeling run down, and have muscle aches and a headache that won't go away all week. Called out of work today and found out my manager just tested positive for COVID. I'll be going in Monday for a test.

The local government had been permitting the protest on I5, and providing police closures of the road for the protestors. IMO, tragedy could have been avoided if they just enforced the law about staying off the highway on foot in the first place. I haven't read a follow up for the last couple of days, but the radio news on the way in to work last Sunday said that this guy was the same one who ran the police barricades a week prior and almost hit protestors. Even if it turns out this was a different guy, it's a damned shame the local government had to wait for deaths to shut this down the same way they waited for several deaths to shut down the CHAZ/CHOP. I'm pretty disgusted at how the local government has been handling a lot of aspects of these protests.

I'm going to drop this in here, not as a denial of any issues surrounding police misconduct, but because I found it a pretty typical example of the many interactions I've seen of SPD with people, including subjects. Most of our local LE are pretty decent folks. https://mynorthwest.com/1999855/rantz-bodycam-seattle-racism-cop-false/?

I think there's a difference between someone seeking out protestors to run over and a vehicle being mobbed by an angry crowd. Slowly running a few people over is preferable to being a sitting duck for a mob. You sure as heck can't sit still for long and not expect your vehicle to be overturned by an angry mob. I think the cases we've seen with this wave of protests tend to run the gamut, though more tilted to the "seeking trouble" end of the scale. When I was in Berlin, my squad leader's patrol car (basically a Ford Escort) was mobbed by an angry crowd of skinheads. German police responded with riot units to extract her. That could have gotten ugly fast, and she was quite shaken by it.

Well, it does have an inauspicious name . . .

True, plus the area they live in is sensitive to the needs of the melanin deficient.

You don't have to point a weapon at someone to meet the requirements for brandishing in most places.

Gilead has already announced that they're letting it be produced royalty-free by generic manufacturers. They've already taken steps to reduce the cost of the drug. This has been in the news for several weeks.

It's still 2020, so I think we all know the answer to that question. It'll have to get in line, though.

So, I've been thinking about what I would have done in that couple's shoes. I've landed on: I'd pull out a couple of folding tables, set them up near the sidewalk, and lay out some refreshments for the protestors. Really, screw that mayor. On the flip side, if I experienced any spillover onto my property (which means near my family), I would act to squelch it. And the couple in the pics needs to have their guns removed until they prove they can handle them safely. They also need brandishing charges.

Sounds like St. Louis needs a recall election.

There are some good suggestions in there, and a little bit of stupid. Of course, the thing is rife with misplaced modifiers, so maybe the stupid bit is just poor writing.

No offense, but that method sucks.

The key to eliminate fogging is to get a tight seal across the top of the mask.

I think you're right that this is going to come up as a mitigating factor, and it should be taken into consideration.

None of that makes the fleeing felon doctrine apply, IMO. The officer would have to reasonably believe that the subject represented an ongoing threat if they let him escape. In this case, the subject's behavior only involved extracting himself from the arrest. As far as the severity of the injuries goes: The officer's lack of hands on training is the issue. Their approach to cuffing him was crap. If Georgia's police academy is teaching officers to cuff the way they did, which was unsafe (you can tell from the injuries), then I'll eat my keyboard. Their hand to hand skills once the scuffle started were also crap. They got themselves injured by not following normal protocols in initiating the arrest, and by being poor fighters. Being bad at your job isn't an indication of the subject's intent.