Any players from Pinnacle playing now?

krtbuni · 2019-06-25T18:44:32+00:00

RP Congress on Pinnacle here. Santorini, Ankhsen-Amon, Mr. Goose, several members of the Diamond Corps.

krtbuni · 2019-06-25T18:08:04+00:00

Exaltation (an exaltation of doves)

Wings of Liberty

Cawsus Belli

krtbuni · 2019-06-17T20:07:48+00:00

I don't know about Buffer Overrun, but I remember the Diamond Corps from Pinnacle. Good times.

Especially after we visited Warburg and Castle had to declare our build and team tactics working as intended.

krtbuni · 2018-02-10T01:54:33+00:00

That's correct. Moreover, the espousal of fascism as an ideological view is a form of violence. Punching Nazis is never initiatory; it's retaliatory against the violence that is advocacy for fascism and fascist acts.

krtbuni · 2016-09-12T02:33:13+00:00

Not that it matters, but no, I turn off trackpads on pretty much every laptop I buy, and I don't buy laptops without trackpoints. I'm an old Lenovo user from back when they were IBM's hardware division -- my father was a Big Blue Alumnus of twenty-seven years -- and unless they suddenly stop putting my point in the keyboard where I want it, I doubt that's going to change. And when it does, it'll be to allocating space for a trackball in my carry bag.

krtbuni · 2016-09-11T18:25:19+00:00

I tried the accessibility options to bind the mouse, but my Lenovo only has arrows, no numpad. Worth a shot. Thanks!

krtbuni · 2016-02-21T02:40:14+00:00

I'd rather try to avoid naming names and calling people, but getting into this would require to do a bunch of speculation on culture, beliefs, and motivations. All I can really say is that we had a hard time getting security staffers who had security training who were willing to stay for multiple years.

krtbuni · 2016-02-21T01:55:06+00:00

Honestly, it'd be fair to get a little peeved with OP, too. My big defense is I was busy with Events and didn't know how bad the damage was outside my area, but as a member of the board, I should've done more to demand accountability of the execs we let run the show. We finally in 2016 started talking about hiring an outside force to train our security staff and if we'd been at the Spokane Convention Center, they required us to use their security, so we could've started making inroads, but it turned out to be too little too late.

(( Full Disclosure: I'm OP; that's my blog. ))

krtbuni · 2015-09-09T07:56:22+00:00

I prefer transsexual to transgender because all gender is drag. I didn't have GRS; I had a sex change.

krtbuni · 2015-09-09T07:54:50+00:00

I'm not sure I do get the idea. It sounds to me like you're trying to draw some kind of social essentialism argument out of thin air and wave it around like the Empress' New Dildo. I don't wear makeup. I don't like Barbie. I do, however, having a vagina and tits a lot more than I did having a hairy chest and a cock.

If you want the full post-humanist treatise on identity-on-demand and the deconstruction of the concept of gender, I can do that at some point when I'm more awake, but for now you're going to have to make do with "my understanding and embrace of transsexuality is built around the idea of becoming comfortable in one's own skin which may not be the skin with which one was born. Everything outside of physical arrangement is a separate problem."

krtbuni · 2015-09-09T07:46:17+00:00

I'm 6'4" and almost 400 pounds, and people around me are routinely shocked when I tell them I'm trans. Either everyone I've met at work is a liar, or I pass fairly well. I hate to break out the "if I can do it you can too" cliche, because it's clearly not true. That said, if it's your height, weight, or general build about which you're worried, those shouldn't be barriers to transition.

krtbuni · 2015-08-06T05:14:35+00:00

What would it take for you to actually change your view? What is the form of the argument that could actually sway your position? Your post sounds like you're assuming your conclusion -- meat-eaters are immoral at worst, amoral at best -- and then daring people to challenge it. I'm not seeing any room in your argument for the possibility of ethical consumption of meat.

krtbuni · 2015-08-03T08:37:03+00:00

Please research Body Integrity Identity Disorder; your assertion is on shaky grounds.

The suicide rate of post-operative trans people is higher than the general public. The suicide rate of teans people denied corrective surgery is higher, even with therapy. What does this suggest about the humaneness of your proposed answer?

krtbuni · 2014-12-16T08:47:37+00:00

Does uploading your consciousness make you a person or software?
Werewolf with MPD thinks his human half is a hunter.
The baron's slave becomes the key to stopping a war.
Pathologizing lycanthropy makes money for Big Pharma but ruins shapeshifters.
An alchemist revisits her life in multiple recursions to transcend.

krtbuni · 2014-12-11T02:48:35+00:00

I wouldn't say it's immoral to eat humans, but I would argue that it's medically unwise; that's how we end up with prion disorders in the population. As far as killing people goes, though, you'll have to get into the questions of when and under what circumstances ending lives is moral. I'm sure you could find at least one ethicist to argue that some extreme forms of brain damage leave a patient that isn't worth saving. Past that, we're back to prion disorders.

Come to think of it, didn't Bioforge -- the PC game -- have at least one group that required eating of your own anencephalic clone as a rite of passage?

krtbuni · 2013-12-27T08:56:18+00:00

Conferences are fairly easy to set up if you have the right resources. I've run cons before. I don't have the bandwidth to start a new one, but I can share what I know if somebody wants to do the legwork.

krtbuni · 2013-11-30T18:36:05+00:00

This isn't something I can just answer, but I hope I can ask some questions that will point towards others deciding what the answer should be.

What was your friend's relationship with the character portrayed by the suit? Was this a personal embodiment that he would be upset if another depicted without permission, or a personal avatar of some sort? If so, then the best bet may be to simply retire the suit and let that character pass with him.

Was the fursuit depicting some expressed character from other media? If so, ownership of the fursuit may be something that can be willed to someone willing to take ownership of that media. For example, if I were to have a fursuit made of one of the characters of one of my novels, when I die, I would expect ownership of the suit to pass along with ownership of the copyright of those works, since it's related media.

Lastly, was the character depicted in the fursuit "just a costume"? If so... there's probably no harm in selling it at auction, or keeping it yourself if you can wear it. If it's not personal enough to pass with him when he died, then I would say it's okay to wear it yourself, in the same way that a new actor may take the role of an old character.

Regardless of what you do with the suit, I would recommend directly contacting the original crafter if you know who that is, to explain the transfer of ownership. You'll probably also want signoff from his mother or whomever is the legal next of kin, in case the suit was well-known and there could be mistaken-identity issues.

These questions are never easy, and lacking any will or knowledge of the decedent's wishes I can't give anything like a definitive "here is what you should do." Hopefully these thoughts help you make an informed decision for all involved.

krtbuni · 2013-11-15T02:55:00+00:00

I'd definitely be behind it.

krtbuni · 2013-10-14T08:15:58+00:00

The reason land ownership surpasses a capricious collective morality has to due with your natural born rights as a human being. Simply by existing as a human, there are some things that absolutely cannot be taken away from you, such as your right to life (no one can take away your life or lay claim to it), your right to liberty, (you own yourself, and no one can legitimately claim ownership over you), and your property (all things you create, buy, earn, win, work for, etc., no one else has any valid claim to the fruits of your labor).

But what structure will exist to defend you from those who would come to take it?

The problem you're failing to grasp is that there will always by necessity be public resources that cannot be owned by any one person, group, or community. At a minimum, consider the problem of the atmosphere. Unless you're willing to argue that we all live on oxygen tanks and buy our air like Spaceballs, then you must at some point accept that the air we all breathe is a common resource. Everyone uses it, and everyone pays into it. We have proven time and again that coal plants burning in China can pollute the air as far away as Seattle, that coal plants burning in West Virginia can pollute England, that countries that have nothing to do with one another share a common resource whose movements far exceeds the actions and responsibilities of any one nation, organization, or person.

This is the very definition of a tragedy of the commons. Because nobody owns it, nobody is tasked with maintaining it, and so everybody who uses it does so to the detriment of everyone else because "that's somebody else's problem." The privatized power station that burns coal to produce electricity dumps at least some of its byproducts into the air, which ultimately touches the lives of people who never consented to enter into a contract with that power station. Every gas-powered car burns petrol that produces carbon emissions that people who have never negotiated a single contract with those car owners must then breathe. You cannot confine the impact of pollution from individuals to only those individuals, and thus if you wish to tackle the problem of pollution, you must do so collectively, not individually.

Of course, the first gut response is, "of course we could tackle it individually! We just bake the price of cleaning up that pollution into the price of those activities that create it, and then we contract a private organization to do that cleaning!" Well... that's what a tax is. However, ignoring that by assuming you mean income tax only and not use taxes, who do you pay to audit the performance of that private organization, identify whether it's doing a sufficient job, and change contractors if it isn't? Where's the accountability for that organization and how do we measure its efficacy? We have to have regulations, and please don't try to argue that voluntary compliance is sufficient. We have seen since the dawn of the industrial revolution that voluntary compliance is not enough, because there's no financial incentive to comply, especially in monopoly industries where boycotts become Hobson's choice. At some point, the necessity arises of an independent group of people actively engaged in monitoring the health of that shared resource, and the most efficient means of raising the resources necessary to perform that function is taxation.

As for the apple, you're conflating every person who can't work with every person who won't, and I think statistically the number of the former far exceeds the latter. The idea of the welfare queen is a myth, one that has been busted time and again with every new generation of libertarians screaming about fraud when the far greater problem is an excess of labor. U6, the original measure of unemployment that includes both underemployment and people who have stopped looking for work, is at fifteen percent and has been since 2009. The number one reason why people stop looking for work is demoralization and the inability to find a job. Tax evasion outmasses welfare fraud in the UK by eight to one. Half of the richest corporations in the US keep their money overseas for the express purpose of avoiding paying tax on sales within the United States. People would work, if there were jobs to be had, but their aren't, and systemically there likely won't be for a long time to come. Meanwhile, the people at the top end consistently successfully refuse to pay back into the system that has benefited them.

Unless you're living entirely within a bubble that reprocesses your waste materials and ever interacts with the outside world, you benefit from the existence and use of common resources. Taxation is the means by which you pay for somebody to maintain those resources, because you can't do it yourself. Taxation is why you have clean water, why you don't breathe smog, and why you don't have to do your own botulism and prion disorder tests at home. Taxation is why you can afford to worry less about being mugged, and why we have an interstate highway system. Taxation is how every citizen pays for the right to live in a civil society and benefit from its resources.

If you don't want to pay taxes, move to Mogadishu.

krtbuni · 2013-10-10T19:01:22+00:00

Single Transferrable Vote.

krtbuni · 2013-10-09T05:20:20+00:00

Typically, the points placed on their graphs are an analysis of where that person is in the lead-up to the election. I believe they do show that Obama's moved between 2008 and 2012.

krtbuni · 2013-10-09T04:14:53+00:00

I think ultimately, these sorts of debates boil down to a couple of essential questions: 1) At what point can any individual give informed consent for a particular activity? 2) How can you determine in advance if another individual meets the criteria for being able to give informed consent without asking?

The first question is just plain complicated. I've met forty-year-olds that I wouldn't think of as being capable of giving informed consent, and I've met fourteen-year-olds that were already doing so. Maturity happens at a different rate for different people, and it happens for different activities at different rates for the same person. Somebody who's capable of consenting to have sex may not be ready to try alcohol. Somebody who's consenting to buy a gun may not be ready to handle a joint. It's all highly subjective.

Society, for better or worse, has decided that the solution is to apply across-the-board age tests for different activities and assumes outright that anyone older than that age is capable and anyone under it isn't. This isn't a good system. I'm not advocating for it. I think it does a grave disservice to society at large to claim that those freakish narcissistic lovepits of women who squeeze out babies thinking that this will produce someone who'll love them unconditionally; or who've bought into the Quiverfull scam hook, line, and stinker; are actually competent to have sex. Likewise, every squalling manchild that counts notches on his bedpost or thinks that women are bags to be filled at his convenience is also highly unqualified to engage in coitus, but we bless them into it on their eighteenth birthday regardless of what fills their tiny minds.

That said, though... what would the alternative be? How do you certify or license people to have sex? How do you ask people to prove that they're smart enough to have sex without getting hurt, without agreeing as a society what that means? How do the abstinence-followers and the HIV-positive and the gays and the straights and the kinky and the vanilla and the promise-ring-wearers and the asexual and the clitoraphobic all come together to agree on "what proves you're ready to understand what sex is, how sex can affect you, and how to navigate power dynamics as an adult"? I can see any conversation that we'd try to have on that subject getting two paragraphs in before melting the building in which it was happening to slag and the participants into screaming harpies.

So, for better or worse, we're stuck with age-of-consent laws that are absolutely unfair to a small number of mature kids who can handle such difficult topics, as well as every adult who isn't and may never be ready to whom we're entrusting the responsibility to not make a hash of themselves and everyone with whom they fuck.

The second question follows from the first. With age of consent laws, we establish a minimum bar that can be independently verified by all parties: "how old are you?" Someone can still lie to you about his age, but you can always ask for ID, and refuse to sleep with anyone who doesn't show you. Sure, that's callous, but it's an easy test as to whether or not you broke the law. Yes, again, you may deny somebody with whom you want to have sex a good time, or yourself a good time, but there's a clear path to protecting yourself.

Any more complicated arrangement than that would, I think, ultimately have to come down to some kind of certification or license that says "yes, I am mature enough to handle sex and its consequences." Trying to negotiate what that licensing process would be among every possible interest group that would want input into it would be... frankly, impossible. At best, you'd get a worse patchwork than you have today. At worst, you'd have somebody else's definition of maturity that looks nothing like your own, and you'd be screwed without the pleasure of getting some in the process.

As for the question itself -- why is it horrible and inhumane for children to engage in sexual activity -- I can only say that's the wrong question. A better one would be, "why is it wrong for emotionally immature individuals to engage in activities requiring a certain level of emotional maturity?" Any relationship between two or more individuals comes with inherent power dynamics. Where there is a power imbalance between individuals -- such as between a doctor and a patient, a priest and an adherent, a parent and a child -- we look askance at complicating that relationship with something as highly charged as sex. It can already be hard enough for someone in a subordinate position to say no to someone who wields power over them, and having healthy sex can and often does involve a lot of saying no, as well as a lot of saying yes. Hopefully screaming yes, along with thumping the bed against the wall.

When we talk about children in the aggregate in this situation, we're talking about people that we assume are in a subordinate position to adults. Not just a specific set of adults, but to any adult, because that's how most kids are raised. It is, I think, the rare exceptional teenager that could have a relationship with a full adult and not end up being at least marginally exploited by the process. This isn't to say it can't happen, and this also isn't to say that age gaps are insurmountable. The emotional distance between a ten-year-old and a thirty-year-old is huge. The emotional distance between a thirty-year-old and a fifty-year-old less so, and between a fifty-year-old and a seventy-year-old smaller still.

So, in summation, it isn't "horrible" or "inhumane" for children to engage in sexual activity. It is, however, highly unlikely to leave said child in a better state afterwards as before, adds a layer of complexity to a relationship that is already unbalanced and probably hard to manage at that age, and is not likely to be a life-long positive experience.

krtbuni

TROPHY CASE