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[ChairmanPoo]

Still an ongoing struggle to find a position with my Master

[Parsely]

Still an ongoing struggle to find a position with my Master's. In the meantime, my BA in Liberal Arts attracted an employer offering decent pay, potential for advancement, and a full benefits package.

STEM types can suck it. :V

Tell us more.

It's kind of the opposite for me. I put a lot into my art and it doesn't attract any clients but my half-finished attempts at making websites got me the job I have right now. I just can't find my market.

[Flying Dice]

Still an ongoing struggle to find a position with my Master's. In the meantime, my BA in Liberal Arts attracted an employer offering decent pay, potential for advancement, and a full benefits package.

STEM types can suck it. :V

Tell us more.

It's kind of the opposite for me. I put a lot into my art and it doesn't attract any clients but my half-finished attempts at making websites got me the job I have right now. I just can't find my market.

More after I go in to talk to them. The firm's a temp agency looking for people to coordinate and conduct interviews and hiring of temps and liaise with client firms. Base pay isn't fantastic, but a company that'll give new hires full medical+dental+vision, a 401k, two weeks vacation, and paid holidays? Fuck yes I'll bite on that.

[Sirus]

Still an ongoing struggle to find a position with my Master's. In the meantime, my BA in Liberal Arts attracted an employer offering decent pay, potential for advancement, and a full benefits package.

STEM types can suck it. :V

Tell us more.

It's kind of the opposite for me. I put a lot into my art and it doesn't attract any clients but my half-finished attempts at making websites got me the job I have right now. I just can't find my market.

More after I go in to talk to them. The firm's a temp agency looking for people to coordinate and conduct interviews and hiring of temps and liaise with client firms. Base pay isn't fantastic, but a company that'll give new hires full medical+dental+vision, a 401k, two weeks vacation, and paid holidays? Fuck yes I'll bite on that.

That's pretty good, all right. Do they offer 401k match as well?

[Flying Dice]

Still an ongoing struggle to find a position with my Master's. In the meantime, my BA in Liberal Arts attracted an employer offering decent pay, potential for advancement, and a full benefits package.

STEM types can suck it. :V

Tell us more.

It's kind of the opposite for me. I put a lot into my art and it doesn't attract any clients but my half-finished attempts at making websites got me the job I have right now. I just can't find my market.

More after I go in to talk to them. The firm's a temp agency looking for people to coordinate and conduct interviews and hiring of temps and liaise with client firms. Base pay isn't fantastic, but a company that'll give new hires full medical+dental+vision, a 401k, two weeks vacation, and paid holidays? Fuck yes I'll bite on that.

That's pretty good, all right. Do they offer 401k match as well?

Not mentioned either way in the contact email. Will be one of the things I poke into when appropriate (if things get that far), but even if they don't it's still a damn sight better than my current prospects for retirement funds, and far beyond "lol you think you deserve benefits, here's permanent part time and we'll fire you if you complain".

[pisskop]

wanted to post this.  again?

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/175

LotR magic

[Sirus]

wanted to post this.  again?

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/175

LotR magic

The problem with applying real-world philosophy to fantasy settings is that pesky "fantasy" word. Sauron is *actually* evil. The orcs are well known to be the corrupted spawn of elves, utterly tainted by quantifiable evil forces. You have literal angels of both good and evil working things behind the scenes.

But hey, far be it for me to disagree with a preachy wall-o-text webcomic.

[Flying Dice]

It's actually rather on the nose if you look at it from a different angle, namely that Foucault, Chomsky, and Fanon are all of the endless-complaints no-action stripe; the latter two almost invariably try to force everything in the world into their overly narrow critical lens because they're unwilling to conceive of or discuss the possibility that the world isn't entirely oriented around the axis of evil wealthy Americans/evil racist Europeans.

IOW if that scenario were to actually occur, Chomsky and Fanon would be totally unable to effectively mobilize the hypothetical counterforce they proposed, and if they somehow did, they would very quickly see Middle Earth ruined, because as noted moral subjectivity doesn't work in a universe where good and evil are definable, physical forces.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Besides, this comic is just a bad copy of the logic used by The Last Ringbearer.

It is unfortunate that Sauron barely has a motivation beyond "fuck everything", though. I was always curious of what exactly he intended to do if he won. Like, just being dictator is kind of a bland goal for a supernatural being. As is, I just sort of settled on the assumption that the Ring made him crazy in the same way as everyone else.

[SalmonGod]

Besides, this comic is just a bad copy of the logic used by The Last Ringbearer.

It is unfortunate that Sauron barely has a motivation beyond "fuck everything", though. I was always curious of what exactly he intended to do if he won. Like, just being dictator is kind of a bland goal for a supernatural being. As is, I just sort of settled on the assumption that the Ring made him crazy in the same way as everyone else.

Morgoth was the one who was "fuck everything".  He was envious of Eru's power as the ultimate creator and too proud to accept his role as just a participant in his song of creation, so he sought to disrupt the music to make it as much his own as possible.  This resulted in Morgoth basically giving up the power to contribute his own unique creations to the world, instead messing with everyone else's in his attempts to make creation his own or destroy what he couldn't.  Following creation, Morgoth's envy led to him stealing the Silmarillions, and that was basically the starting point of Middle Earth history.

Sauron was Morgoth's right-hand man, and extremely faithful to him.  After Morgoth was defeated and imprisoned, Sauron basically laid low as a fugitive from the Valar and all their mortal allies for hundreds of years.  Eventually, they all let their guard down, and he snuck back into Morgoth's old lair to start building it back up again.  The ring's ultimate purpose was a fail-safe.  As long as the ring wasn't destroyed, Sauron couldn't be either.  It didn't really make him more powerful or drive him crazy, because its power came from being imbued with his own essence.  He essentially weakened himself to create it and was incomplete without it.  What power it did give him was the influence he extended through it to the bearers of the other rings.  In typical Tolkien fashion, this is basically a lesser version of the same thing Morgoth did.  Morgoth imbued his will into all of Arda, so that everything would gradually, unavoidably bend towards his interests over time.  But in the process, he gave up his immortality and his ability to change forms.

I imagine his motivations were a combination of continuing loyalty to Morgoth (acting in his place until he returns?  spite and vengeance in his name?), and rising to power being the only way for him to live freely after making himself a divine criminal.

[Flying Dice]

I mean, he kinda does? Sauron first allied with Melkor because dude had a hard-on for order and efficiency. He served Melkor loyally and without intent to betray for a damn long time. When he tried to repent after Morgoth's fall, he meant it, and only fell again because of the literal corrupting evil he had been tainted by. He backslid while trying to uplift and repair Middle-Earth, and Tolkien's WoG is that Sauron in the early days of the Second Age was genuinely a grey figure, not good, but not wholly evil. That continues; the rest of his history is him trying to impose order on the world, and he's an evil figure predominantly because contact with his former boss twisted him so much that he can only conceive of doing so by enslaving its peoples and bringing its lands under his dominion.

It's not like he was always an evil mold-stamped dictator, or that he woke up one morning and decided that world domination was what he wanted most.

[SalmonGod]

Yarr... I did come across the obsession with order thing while quickly googling to check the accuracy of my thoughts.  Left that out, because I couldn't remember that aspect specifically from my readings, but it's been like 8 years or something since I read the Silmarillion.  But it does make a lot of sense, what with Tolkien modeling his writing after classic mythology, and all his divine beings representing some fundamental concept.  Sauron being an avatar of order that's been corrupted by the source of all evil is fitting.

I seem to remember him being pretty much always evil after serving Morgoth, though.  The Second Age was all about Numenor, and I remember Tolkien's writing being pretty clear on Sauron's intentions from the beginning to gain the Numenorean's trust and turn them against the Valar.  It was just a very long game.  He had to put on quite an act in the beginning.

[Comrade P.]

I might've just stayed up all night playing a videogame. Never happened before.

Kinda good while it lasted, but now I've got a head full of lead and an obligation to go to work.

But so worth it. I've been waiting for more than a year for this release.

[ArchAIngel]

I might've just stayed up all night playing a videogame. Never happened before.

Kinda good while it lasted, but now I've got a head full of lead and an obligation to go to work.

But so worth it. I've been waiting for more than a year for this release.

Wot's da game?


Can't think of any recent ones other than Fate/Extella.

[Comrade P.]

Pyre, by Supergiant Games (also known for Bastion, Transistor)