Dopple

So that's what the sound in Disco Train is.

Sounds like it wants to sync but isn't quite there. Driving me crazy.

Of course I had the taste to be a handsome lalafell. Why would you make anything else? Your other choices are human, big human, really big human, cat person, or elf. Sorry, I said elf; I meant ELEZEN, who are actually tall French people with pointy ears. I don't know why the whole yeah let's name our human race 'Hyur,' or 'Hume,' or something vaguely like 'human' that you might as well just say human without dancing around the word, but all right.

Surrounded by Crispy Bacons and Box Lickers, I've fortunately yet to have anyone ask why my name is stupid. It's Valruki Manaruki, with the whole "nice poem" thing going on because if you're a plainsfolk male like me, your name follows the scheme AB CB, where each of A B and C is restricted to one or two syllables. Along with a number of other fun rules involving repetition and suspiciously Japanese-sounding vowels that make coming up with a non-weeaboo name a nightmare. What's this anal business? They have naming conventions depending on your race, home region, and gender. Obviously most people don't care, otherwise we'd have fewer Kirito Dualbladeses walking around.

I appreciate the amount of thought they put into it, even though the end results have a high chance of stupid. How do you go about figuring it out? Whatever the case, as long as you don't call yourself something like 'Fafajoni' or my favourite, 'Tatatucha,' I think we're good.

The writing is magnitudes better than TERA's, but that's not saying much because TERA barely made any goddamn sense. Here NPCs at least explain why they can't just take out the trash themselves, and they don't (usually) ask you talk on their behalf to someone standing 10 feet away. So wonderful... Actually, I'm tired of reading crap in general so I've been giving dialogue bubbles a fraction of a second at most. Besides the standard 'Woe is me, now help fetch some bug shells,' that's all I really noticed.

Oh, yeah, gameplay? I know a handful of folks dying to play this from the beta, and it occurs to me that they're dying to play WoW. It's been all right, think WoW with an extra few elements, different lore, a shiny world/UI, and awful latency.

Music is easily soundtrack of the year. 10/10.

There is no justice in the world, Kabukiman.

Three decades. Three decades has our greatest unsung hero called to the spirit of adventure, beckoning us to join him in discovering foreign lands--always, always with excitement and wonder, never burdened by the disappointments of reality. And three decades had he remained unhassled by the banshee claws of BL fangirls. For the longest time, it was as though he were impervious to their poison, just as he remained impervious to wickedness and despair in his journeys.

That ended tonight. It ended as abruptly and surely as glass shatters against stone, the reverberations of which rot my heart to its core.

I tell you, the arrival of the Evil One cannot be soon enough.

Also on the contrary, I'm not good at trolling.

If we're talking about a hypothetical situation, though? I think subtlety is useful and overlooked. You wanna be abrasive enough to dig under people's skin, but not so overt that they can just get rid of you (for example, using the rules).

Posting shock images and flaming incoherently is easy and probably won't have much impact unless you're harassing eight year old children. There's more success to be found in the willful ignorance route, but a lot of the time they'll shrug you off or work harder to ban you.

It's a little more difficult to identify things that make a particular community or person tick, and exploit them. What makes your position more threatening is how valid it appears, and how close it is to striking home on something personal. At that point you can add on some ridicule, and you'll likely start seeing people get upset. I think really successful trolling isn't when others should refuse to respond, but when they can't.

For a second I forgot what I was doing in here and was confused. Then I started laughing. You got me.

When I was over in Macau, many stalls were selling jerky as their main souvenir. I remember two of these shops, located directly across the street from each other. One of them was crowded, and the other was empty with its owners standing sullenly by the entrance, staring at the other side. This continued for about twenty minutes. So tourists would come by and see these two hubs receiving wildly different traffic, and they'd immediately assume that there was something wrong with the unpopular one. Then they'd go join the crowd, and the other store stayed perpetually empty, not because it sold bad wares, but because it was empty.

(On the way back, there was a turnaround on the flow of costumers and the previously popular store was experiencing a serious case of tumbleweeds while the other store prospered. I bought some from both and honestly couldn't tell the difference.)

TL;DR: Average people making judgements based on those of their peers.

Gang up on a single member for no other reason than "he's weird".

People may very well use something vapid like "That fellow there is an idiot," as the reason for their own negative behaviour. Or "he's weird," as you put it. But how elaborate a reason is mostly depends on its validity coming under fire. You'd get a "No, [x, y and θ reasons]!" in response to directing your criticism there.

The reasons aren't that important I don't think.

I think it's got more to do with social aspects: My friend(s) don't like this person which predisposes me to dislike him also; my friend(s) disapprove of this arbitrary behaviour... et cetera. It can take just one opinion to tip the scale in that direction. When you don't like someone, it's a lot easier to find everything he says and does annoying, as well as inflate his flaws while downplaying his merits. Then add the fact that people generally feel more secure acting as a group, and you have a pretty good recipe for a bandwagon. (The opposite is also true: if nobody agrees with a certain position, someone taking that position can feel pressured into reconsidering it, even if it's correct.)

But anyone can become a "sheep" under the right circumstances and environment, so I don't like to fling that kind of accusation around. It's really just people being people.

... Huh, this wasn't what the topic was supposed to be about, was it? I don't exactly have a storied record of drama following me.

Ice Cave Chant by Eveline Fischer, Donkey Kong Country

Oh, right. I'm fairly used to PVP where you just mash one or two keys and stare at the screen until somebody dies. Reminds me of the time I went into the PVP arena in Ragnarok, and some mage had holed himself in a cubby with multiple Ice Walls. At first he laughed at me, but I was playing a hunter and it turned out that I had an attack that could bypass line of sight. His taunting turned into "noooo stop" pretty quickly. Well, no. I didn't stop.

I'm so proud of me for neglecting homework. This is Rengar from League of Legends, by the way. Isn't he the sweetest?

That bit definitely got me.

I remember when I was about 12 I'd have these uber-powerful Marty Stu characters (10 of them!), though. It was ridiculous and yet it seemed to make sense at that point in my life.

I know that feel bro. :(

I had quite a few hearty laughs. I think this was my favourite part:

As I got closer, I saw the horror that had occurred. Lyra was laying there, a long, bloodied blade sticking from her back, impaling her, a draconequus with flowing white hair holding its handle.