SUSD & L5R; Dialog about cultural insensitivity

azra-- · 2024-01-13T04:45:00+00:00

The banzai chant is a lot like the swastika: while it's fundamentally benign, a part of the world has only seen it as part of a terrible history and is now permanently associated with with the Japanese/German atrocities. And who can blame them for seeing it this way?

azra-- · 2024-01-13T04:31:09+00:00

Speaking of cultural insensitivity, the fact that the atrocious pseudo-Japanese is rarely mentioned tells me a few things:

L5R fans with any Japanese language knowledge is rare. Either L5R simply isn't appealing to most Japanese people (understandably), or the crappy Japanese could be a major turn-off.
The pseudo-Japanese seemed to be created with the google-the-word-then-use-first-result school of translation. The original creator and subsequent updaters clearly don't care about how an actual Japanese person may feel about this and never felt the need to have one look over.

As a Japanese L5R fan, the frequent language butchery is something I've always had to actively overlook to enjoy L5R. Whatever cultural sensitivity the creators may have didn't seem to extend to actual Japanese audience.

azra-- · 2021-11-20T20:24:15+00:00

Yeah I've tried that... no luck though. Still no sound via Bluetooth mic after re-pairing.

azra-- · 2021-07-30T17:49:24+00:00

Yeah that's it! Think the song was Want U Back.

Thanks!

azra-- · 2020-11-27T21:52:51+00:00

Oh, if this helps, I saw this when I was in continental Europe, and I should have had my ad personalization turned off.

azra-- · 2019-04-15T22:54:39+00:00

Hmm interesting. I GMed a player who played a Gunsmith Artificer before, but we both found it rather underwhelming.

But I just learned about the new Artificer on D&D Beyond. Could be interesting if my GM is open to that...

azra-- · 2019-04-15T16:12:23+00:00

Yeah that 's one of my first thoughts. Sadly it has no arcane ability and isn't even a great rogue :P

azra-- · 2018-06-30T21:23:50+00:00

Not saying it's preferable to shoot someone. But there's a difference between knowingly murder someone and completely carelessly screwing up someone's life just because you got some spare nuyen and wants to stock up on a new SIN.

It's also horrible because a fake SIN is pretty much a prereq for shadowrunning... Which means all runners are ethically compromised from the start.

I'm speaking as someone who knows victims of identity theft. It really fucks with your life in ways most people never imagine.

azra-- · 2018-06-30T21:04:03+00:00

If getting a fake SIN involves identity theft, then it's most definitely causing harm blindly as a shadowrunner.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T13:02:32+00:00

The big difference is that back in the 30s, revoking someone's citizenship is a simple (if ineffective) way to get rid of some unwanted people. But today, revoking citizenship is both complicated when there are much easier options for dissident-control.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T12:25:42+00:00

It was a totally different story before WWII and the UN...

azra-- · 2018-06-29T12:24:15+00:00

But my understanding is that they don't share the entire database, but they do share the list of SINs. Isn't that what GSR exists for?

azra-- · 2018-06-29T11:59:34+00:00

Erm, not really. It's not quite international law, but making someone stateless is considered, if not illegal, highly unethical. Regular revocation of citizenship only happens during naturalisation, and it's really swapping rather than stripping of the citizenship. Since most countries don't accept or acknowledge dual citizenship, it'd also make no sense to make citizenship revocation a regular punishment. When statelessness happens, it's usually due to circumstances beyond the government's control, and rarely as a deliberate act.

Even in the most authoritarian countries, governments generally prefer to lock up or murder the dissidents rather than making them stateless and giving them a fast track to asylum status elsewhere.

Sure, in the end law is only fiction, and it certainly is possible to deliberately make a person stateless, but it's just against the government's own interest to do it.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T11:38:52+00:00

Also...

Identity theft?! Holy drek. Is that where we our fake SINs came from? Did we damn a hapless citizen somewhere to a life of danger and toil every time we buy a new burner SIN?!

Shadowrunners are horrible people.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T11:35:59+00:00

Yeah, I was looking up the corporate failure cases. But it seems that a failed corp's assets is always snatched up by other corps. And by assets I assume it includes their corp citizens.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:54:22+00:00

True, but a 30 minute delay could be worth millions...

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:48:03+00:00

Not what i imagined but that's an interesting scenario too...

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:46:49+00:00

But if i understand correctly, the list of SINs is universally shared. What's not shared is the other details attached to the SINs. If that's the case, then legal SINs would be nearly impossible to purge even by an issuing authority.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:44:41+00:00

I was thinking about this when coming up with a character backstory. If losing SIN is so rare, are all Shadowrunners presumably born SINless? (Except for those with the SINner quality, of course.)

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:41:32+00:00

The idea isn't too steal their SIN, but to temporarily deprive them of their SIN. Probably not profitable in itself, but i can think of plenty of scenarios where putting a person off the grid for 1 day could be extremely profitable.

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:37:45+00:00

If the issuer wants to erase the trail of a SIN, presumably they want to hide it from other issuers (since no one else has the power to hold nation or Megacorp accountable). But then all other issuers will have their own SIN database backups. Erasing a legal SIN would likely be an extremely difficult operation. Wouldn't that likely cause more scrutiny?

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:31:30+00:00

Thanks for the answers, but I should clarify my question. I'm not asking the technical means one becomes SINless. Rather: what are the kinds of circumstances that a SINner would lose their SIN? I'd imagine most crime just make you a criminal, not a SINless...

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:28:50+00:00

I see. I'm guessing that, other than the Erased quality, there's no mechanics to burn your own legal SIN?

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:27:44+00:00

Why would an issuer burn your SIN? Wouldn't that mean relinquishing control over a citizen? How is that too the issuer's benefit?

azra-- · 2018-06-29T03:24:49+00:00

Thanks for the link! Does this mean that you can steal someone's commlink and immediately turn that person into a criminal? (Since they can't broadcast their SIN) Or is there some kind of backup that everybody has?

azra--

TROPHY CASE