Well, now I'm in a bad mood. *various rants*
This morning started off not so great already because Darwin kept waking us (mostly Ronnie) up in the middle of the night, wanting to go out. Ronnie said Darwin went out FOUR times including the once that I let him out. So we're both already sleep-deprived.
Then I went on the Oblivion forums like I've been doing most every day; I hang out in the Screenshots thread because I like to look at the pretty pictures of people's characters, and I get new links to armor mods and such from there. And...someone posted a new character with red hair, to which some kid posted "A ginger...thats a new one. I like it. The asians get old.."
WTF?!?!?!?
Seriously. Oblivion is a game in which not a single playable race that exists in the vanilla world can be interpreted as "Asian". There are Nords (as the name implies, Nordic/Viking types), Bretons (interpreted as French/British), Imperials (more Roman but also British), three types of elves, a cat and a lizard race, and Redguards, who are dark-skinned and generally African/Caribbean (more on those in a second). There have been 198 threads in the Oblivion forums on screenshots, and I can guarantee you that less than 1% of the characters posted there are even Asian-looking. Yeah. You wanna guess what most of them look like? I don't think I could even tell you when I last saw a Redguard character posted. (Which, argh, there really aren't any realistic Redguard hair mods out there, either.) So yeah, just another stupid thing that's reflective of the dominant standard of beauty (that I try to counter by posting my far less usual-looking characters, but I end up getting more comments on the "cool action shots" rather than how nice they look. Which is a whole other kettle of fish that I don't feel like getting into right now.)
So it's really only minor gamer stupidity, but it bugged me (and no one's yet commented on my reply, which was, "Um, what? Show me three Asian characters in this thread." I do have a more articulate reply planned should that be necessary, involving pictures of actual Asian people compared to the potential example screenshots of pretty white girls.)
Next: dental stuff. I put off getting on Crow Canyon's dental plan because it was going to be a lengthy waiting period for anything Ronnie needed done anyway, and we'd hoped that he'd get on his own insurance sooner for that kind of stuff. But things are coming to a head (er, so to speak) and so today I investigated our options vis-a-vis CCAC's voluntary dental plan (yes, this is a run-on sentence but I'm in a ranty damn bad mood).
Yeah. Notsomuch with the coverage we need. At all. It doesn't cover *anything* major, including what I'd consider a fairly standard "major" thing, a frigging root canal. Which is just great.
What I'd like to do for the rest of the morning is go break rocks downstairs, but I get the feeling that being angry + flintknapping is a good way to = smashed fingers and being more pissed off, so never mind on that front, I guess. Grrrr.
Then I went on the Oblivion forums like I've been doing most every day; I hang out in the Screenshots thread because I like to look at the pretty pictures of people's characters, and I get new links to armor mods and such from there. And...someone posted a new character with red hair, to which some kid posted "A ginger...thats a new one. I like it. The asians get old.."
WTF?!?!?!?
Seriously. Oblivion is a game in which not a single playable race that exists in the vanilla world can be interpreted as "Asian". There are Nords (as the name implies, Nordic/Viking types), Bretons (interpreted as French/British), Imperials (more Roman but also British), three types of elves, a cat and a lizard race, and Redguards, who are dark-skinned and generally African/Caribbean (more on those in a second). There have been 198 threads in the Oblivion forums on screenshots, and I can guarantee you that less than 1% of the characters posted there are even Asian-looking. Yeah. You wanna guess what most of them look like? I don't think I could even tell you when I last saw a Redguard character posted. (Which, argh, there really aren't any realistic Redguard hair mods out there, either.) So yeah, just another stupid thing that's reflective of the dominant standard of beauty (that I try to counter by posting my far less usual-looking characters, but I end up getting more comments on the "cool action shots" rather than how nice they look. Which is a whole other kettle of fish that I don't feel like getting into right now.)
So it's really only minor gamer stupidity, but it bugged me (and no one's yet commented on my reply, which was, "Um, what? Show me three Asian characters in this thread." I do have a more articulate reply planned should that be necessary, involving pictures of actual Asian people compared to the potential example screenshots of pretty white girls.)
Next: dental stuff. I put off getting on Crow Canyon's dental plan because it was going to be a lengthy waiting period for anything Ronnie needed done anyway, and we'd hoped that he'd get on his own insurance sooner for that kind of stuff. But things are coming to a head (er, so to speak) and so today I investigated our options vis-a-vis CCAC's voluntary dental plan (yes, this is a run-on sentence but I'm in a ranty damn bad mood).
Yeah. Notsomuch with the coverage we need. At all. It doesn't cover *anything* major, including what I'd consider a fairly standard "major" thing, a frigging root canal. Which is just great.
What I'd like to do for the rest of the morning is go break rocks downstairs, but I get the feeling that being angry + flintknapping is a good way to = smashed fingers and being more pissed off, so never mind on that front, I guess. Grrrr.