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General chat thread

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Hatless Nuance said:
The first RPG that I ever GMed was in a setting that was heavily based on fantasy Japan, and the object spirit angle was a riot. There was a minor recurring character that was a defector from a race of spider-centaur people made of soulless nightmares who mostly lived by tormenting others and effectively owned an entire region of the setting. He was married to his hat. The PCs were at his wedding.
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Ah, of course, the sequel to The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
 
This may sound facetious,but I've noticed that the best way to tell that an artist is good is by checking if they made good barefoot art.

Never fails.
 
TanaNari said:
Dude. Right there in the very sentence you quoted.





Except, again, kami is a broad term. It would be accurate to call them "scientists" and then yokai are one subset. Except kami isn't so narrow a term as 'scientist' and is more accurately as broad a classification as 'person'.

At most, you might make the argument that yokai are 'supernatural creatures' like ghosts and apparitions, rather than physical objects like most kami tend to be. Which is a very recent definition that doesn't apply to most of Japanese history. And sort of ignores all the 'haunted objects' yokai of history.

And also ignores how some kami have natures as broad and nonphysical as 'love' and 'trade'.


Kami are spirits. All spirits. Including human. Yokai are a specific subset of ghostly spirits that tend toward the destructive. Not that there aren't plenty of destructive kami overseeing everything from war to disease to death in childbirth to suicide.

Sometimes, the tradition acknowledges a particular yokai as a kami. Take the kappa, for example. A yokai that goes around pulling souls out through the butthole. And also a river/lake kami.

Or the Tengu- a yokai, also a forest and/or mountain kami.

Even wikipedia gets this right:

en.wikipedia.org

Kappa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

en.wikipedia.org

Tengu - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Wikipedia is wrong on this, and if that's where you're getting your info then its no wonder why you have a mistaken impression. Wikipedia doesn't have have kitsune ranks as just one major thing they have completely wrong. You know: Tenko, Zenko, Kuko, Kiko...
 
vyor said:
if that's where you're getting your info then its no wonder why you have a mistaken impression
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No, I talk to actual nerds who are interested in this sort of thing, and cross-compare how this stuff differs from one animist culture to another. It's really quite fascinating how every continent (sans Antarctica) has their own unique traditions that are in some ways nearly identical and in others couldn't be more different.


You're the one who seems to be mixing up European folklore- where there are usually very clear distinctions between types of spirits (such as seelie and unseelie fey or their fomori predecessors)- and Asian folklore which tends to be less... rigid... in these things.

Leaving out, of course, Norse mythology which has an interesting habit of having most members of the various supernatural races look so similar that they cannot tell the difference between one another or mere mortals by looking at them.


Though you're right that wikipedia fucked up a lot of information. But they got the 'can be both' thing correct.
 
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TanaNari said:
No, I talk to actual nerds who are interested in this sort of thing, and cross-compare how this stuff differs from one animist culture to another. It's really quite fascinating how every continent (sans Antarctica) has their own unique traditions that are in some ways nearly identical and in others couldn't be more different
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I got my information from someone that actually practices the religion. Though it could very well be a regional thing!
 
vyor said:
Though it could very well be a regional thing!
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Regional and/or temporal. The words are something like three thousand years old. Like almost anything else, concepts change with time.

Generally better to work with broad strokes and a clinical approach when it comes to living religions (especially the old ones) unless you're specifically trying to focus on doctrinal schisms.

Kinda like Christianity- you have to believe Jesus was the son of God and he sacrificed himself to save us from our sins. That is a requirement of the faith.

Everything else? Well, that depends on who you ask.
 
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TanaNari said:
Kinda like Christianity- you have to believe Jesus was the son of God and he sacrificed himself to save us from our sins. That is a requirement of the faith.
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Pretty sure there are sects that define themselves as Christian who believe Christ was "the best of men" but not actually divine, and there are Hindu sects who believe Christ was a god who fits into the Hindu pantheon and would deny being Christian.

And there are probably even weirder religious exceptions out there -- faith is like law, it's freely able to ignore internal contradictions.
 
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TanaNari said:
I know there are Jewish sects that take that stance, but I'm not aware of any Christian ones. Wouldn't surprise me, regardless.
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I remember that quote from one of the American Founding Fathers writing to another about religious freedom so I strongly suspect that it wasn't a Jewish person ... but who knows.
 
evildice said:
I remember that quote from one of the American Founding Fathers writing to another about religious freedom so I strongly suspect that it wasn't a Jewish person ... but who knows.
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That was probably Thomas Jefferson, who I'm pretty sure I've had conversations where you've participated where I called him "America's First Supervillain".

Apparently he took a bible, literally cut it apart to take all the passages he liked and glued them into a blank book. Well before the point of the American Revolution.

By the time he became president, he was either agnostic or straight up atheist. And only pretended to be Christian for much the same reasons that he pretended he hadn't sired multiple children with a slave- public image.

You know, when he wasn't busy murdering puppies.
 
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I'm kinda feeling lost, not sure what skills I want to pick up or will be ultra useful in a generalist manner

I sure AF don't have the personality type to survive the office/business world

Brilliant.org's pretty nice, but not sure what will be useful

Any ideas? Got a LOT of books and online classes I bought on discount
 
TanaNari said:
Hinduism is fifty religions in a trenchcoat.
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I think the last count was about 300,000,000 defined sects by someone that spent several decades of their life to answer that exact question (how many are there?).
evildice said:
Ah, of course, the sequel to The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
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That title inspired the character, I do recall. I have not actually read the story, though.

There were also points where the party had a brief conversation with the floor of a newly-created mechanical lift in a mine shaft, a little girl's soul trapped in a shoddily-made metal medallion was taken by wild scorpions from the horde of the mad mage that made and owned it, (before the party found it due to killing the scorpions after they were attacked by them and insisting on searching the scorpion's den, and then being conscripted to deal with that very mage to allow a regional official they had annoyed to heal her arm with a ludicrously valuable magical item that mage had), a man that randomly teleports anywhere from every few seconds to every day who had a child with the invulnerable queen-maker of the demon realm joined up briefly to try making sense of the mortal realm, they encountered a mountain range that had all of its spirits removed so it could be a magic dead zone to seal an allegedly-catastrophically-dangerous being (who was, in fact, just really annoying) watched over by the son of Son Wukong, the closest several party members came to dying was in a fight against a random shapeshifting badger, and they got to experience episodes from fanfic for Touhou and Puella Magi Madoka Magica that I have never written. And the person that the campaign was allegedly focused on, a nameless foreign priest with eight souls, wound up being not nearly as important as that by the end when the party had to downgrade a ritual that would have put a 150-mile-diameter hole in the world leading straight to oblivion/the void beyond into "just" sinking 99.9% of the landmass in that area into the sea.

The lasting legacy among the players from that campaign I still interact with is that the single most important decision made in the entire story, and the introduction of the party's unquestionably-favorite NPC, was one party member buying a musk ox to haul the party's stuff in the first session. That ox, named Bob, would turn out to be a near-embodiment of zen, and wind up being called the hero of the story by the players. To the point that when he charged through a wall to sneak-attack a nightmare-empowered batshit-insane samurai-trained lord general of the dark region run by nightmare monsters, and proceeded to one-shot that enemy (who was singlehandedly fighting off half the party on their own before), nobody was surprised.
 
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I'm pretty sure the plural of Manga is just manga. Same with anime too.
 
I was looking at pictures of gemstones the other day and I have to say some of the uncut versions of the gems looked way better than any of the cut versions of the gems.

Also opals can look really fucking cool.
 
TanaNari said:
Hinduism is fifty religions in a trenchcoat.
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Hatless Nuance said:
I think the last count was about 300,000,000 defined sects by someone that spent several decades of their life to answer that exact question (how many are there?).
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It makes a lot of sense as to why there are so many though, in a sense it's the world's oldest pagan religion that keeps on surviving

IndoEuropean Mythology, of which includes Hinduism, had many different sub ethnicities within, the Germanic Wotan is equated with the Norse Odin but we're not sure exactly how much they differ

Artemis apparently has a version of her that's a fertility mother goddess with many boobs, the Diana of the Ephesians

We've lost a LOT of pagan myth, mainly because they were oral
 
SuperPulp2789 said:
It makes a lot of sense as to why there are so many though, in a sense it's the world's oldest pagan religion that keeps on surviving

IndoEuropean Mythology, of which includes Hinduism, had many different sub ethnicities within, the Germanic Wotan is equated with the Norse Odin but we're not sure exactly how much they differ

Artemis apparently has a version of her that's a fertility mother goddess with many boobs, the Diana of the Ephesians

We've lost a LOT of pagan myth, mainly because they were oral
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No she's not, they're bull testicles, yes she's a fertility goddess but the many tits thing is a misunderstanding.

Now canonically so far as such things can go, Artemis even virginal artemis has big tiddies because this is one of the things said about her as an insult.
 
I just learnt that I was the only bloke that actually enjoyed those foreign language classes in school.

Why didn't anyone tell me sooner? It makes me feel really oblivious. My friends really suck at this "communication" stuff.
 
Daytripper said:
Do I have issues when it comes to caring about what people think?
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Considering you keep pestering people who have little reason to think of you at all for their opinions? Yeah, just a little.

You're asking a bunch of basically strangers, which is a little different than asking friends.
 
Treble said:
I just learnt that I was the only bloke that actually enjoyed those foreign language classes in school.

Why didn't anyone tell me sooner? It makes me feel really oblivious. My friends really suck at this "communication" stuff.
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Did they not feed you in foreign language classes, that was the main reason everyone in my school liked them after all

and the foreign language film and television
 
My French teacher was one of those aggressively patriotic northerners, so I doubt she'd push for "cultural immersion" or something. I kinda liked the old girl, even though she treated me like I was....er, "special needs" is the polite term these days.

Topped every single exam she threw at me, so I don't really hold a grudge over it. My performance speaks for itself.

Shame she had such an annoying personality. She was a really pretty girl, with those cute pink cheeks and girly face. Not at all what I'd expected from a Northerner. IIRC, she still looked young despite having had 2 kids by then. In her mid 20s.
 
Now that I think about it... man what even are bugs?
 
TanaNari said:
You forgot parasites and the favored tool of the CIA.

But I repeat myself.
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I did not, I merely spoke of some of the most often occurring members.

The VW automobile would like a word with your memory, as would a verb meaning "to pester or annoy". The verb is quite insistent for your attention. It dislikes that you forgot about it and it's going to make its displeasure known.
 
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