Ask a Question Game - Backwater Thread

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erdelyii wrote:

Q: Why do you think torture devices usually do not have a single named inventor?

if you are averse generally or right now to contemplating/ looking up torture methods or thinking about the dark side of humanity, and respect for that, no need to think on it too much, we all vary - you might prefer this question anyway -

Q: Would life be better or worse if superheroes and villains were real working beings, and how would it be different than in the movies?

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j33bus wrote:

Oooo doubling down, I'm gonna double down on answers.

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j33bus wrote:

Q: If you could have one super power what would it be?

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erdelyii wrote:

Freezing time and moving around in the world without ageing. I imagine that would be pretty intense though.

Q: Has that latter power been treated in a story?

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j33bus wrote:

Q: Man I'm pretty much out right now, Still sane exile?

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1453R wrote:

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j33bus wrote:

Q: Man I'm pretty much out right now, Still sane exile?

A.) What's the definition of sanity?

According to the Goddess of Knowledge, sanity is more-or-less summarized as being rational and in good mental health, with no emotional issues. The term 'wholeness' is invoked, with 'Sane' being inferred as a term applied only to those with a stable and untroubled psyche.

By that standard, is anyone truly, fully, sane?

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In The Sane Society, published in 1955, psychologist Erich Fromm proposed that, not just individuals, but entire societies "may be lacking in sanity". Fromm argued that one of the most deceptive features of social life involves "consensual validation":[6]

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth... Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.[7]

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1453R wrote:

Stress is an ever-present issue that pushes billions of people towards imbalance and a loss of mental equilibrium, especially in the modern era where the issues of mental health and the effects of constant long-term exposure to so-called 'ordinary' stressors is only really now being seriously investigated. Holistic medicine and other whole-health disciplines are (often rightly) laughed off as being so much New Age hippie hooey and the domain of the very pose-est of posers, but the corollary is that anything which can't be solved with a pill basically goes unsolved.

I know I've been struggling with severe frustration issues that have no real outlet (I know, I know, TMI. You did, technically, ask :P), and by the assumed definition given by the Goddess of Knowledge, this emotional imbalance issue means I am less sane than someone who is not dealing with severe frustration issues.

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1453r wrote:

Given this, would sanity be considered more of a sliding scale than a binary yes/no Boolean state? If so, at what point does one cross the line from being considered 'Sane' to being considered 'Insane'? Especially in the context of Wraeclast where a flower-petaly woman who was so much better when she was Russian is asking you if you're possessed of your faculties enough to do her dirty laundry for her. Is anyone in such a situation truly sane, by modern Non_Wraeclast standards?

How sane can anyone really be in a world filled with as much insanity as this one is?

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1453R wrote:

Do we need a new definition of sanity? Or are we all just a little bit insane, some more than others, and the goal is not perfect sanity but rather functionality, i.e. the ability to smoothly operate within within the modern world, navigate its dangers and pitfalls, and avoid the failure states of raging bankruptcy, criminal sentencing, institutionalization, or death? Is it okay to be insane, so long as you're not so insane that you cannot function in the world? And if so, what good does the difference between sanity and insanity do us?

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The Framework applies not just to people who have been in contact with the mental health or criminal justice systems, but to all of us. It summarises and integrates a great deal of evidence about the role of various kinds of power in people’s lives, the kinds of threat that misuse of power pose to us and the ways we have learnt to respond to those threats.

In traditional mental health practice, threat responses are sometimes called ‘symptoms’. The Framework looks instead at how we make sense of these difficult experiences and how messages from wider society can increase our feelings of shame, self-blame, isolation, fear and guilt.

The approach of the Framework is summarised in four questions that can apply to individuals, families or social groups:

What has happened to you? (How is power operating in your life?)
How did it affect you? (What kind of threats does this pose?)
What sense did you make of it? (What is the meaning of these situations and experiences to you?)
What did you have to do to survive? (What kinds of threat response are you using?)
Two further questions help us think about what skills and resources people might have and how they might pull all these ideas and responses together into a personal narrative or story:

What are your strengths? (What access to Power resources do you have?)
What is your story? (How does all this fit together?)

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1453R wrote:

Am I sane? A psychiatrist would probably say yes. But she would also likely recommend some kind of treatment somewhere, and does one treat something that isn't wrong? If you can look yourself in the mirror and say "a psychiatrist would recommend I seek some kind of help", can you call yourself sane?

Q.) How do you like them apples?

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1453R wrote:

Hueh. All righty.

A1.) On the subject of frustration: I work a call center job, which requires me to maintain a Sunny Professional Disposition when talking to the dumbest people who’ve ever lived. Anyone who thinks working a phone-type job in a cubicle farm is Easy Street and we’re all too lazy to get real work is out of their bleeding mind – imagine the most frustrating call you’ve ever had with your mother-in-law, trying to get her to understand something or get her off your back, then imagine doing that for eight hours a day five days a week and not ever being allowed to get upset about it.

Frustration in my case mostly takes the shape of helplessness – I can’t do anything about the unending stream of nits lacking wits who continually ask the same dumb questions every day, or insist on asking questions outside my areas of expertise because they’re desperate and too dumb to figure out their own answers. Coping mechanisms involve just eating it and letting the frustration bleed off, sometimes via calling in a ‘fuck it’ day where I just cannot tolerate the thought of another day in the farm. It’s not even remotely healthy, but not getting paid at all is a whole lot less healthy.

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With the possible exception of Sesame Street’s Oscar the Grouch, very few of us have the luxury of being able to be completely and utterly ourselves all the time at work. The rest of us are called upon to perform what psychologists call “emotional labor” — the effort it takes to keep your professional game face on when what you’re doing is not concordant with how you feel. We do this outside the office too (making polite chit-chat in the elevator when you’re feeling tired and surly comes to mind), but it is perhaps more important at work because most of us are there many hours per week, and our professional images and livelihoods depend on it.

For example, your boss makes a meant-to-be inspiring comment about doing more with less, and you smile and nod, but what you’d like to do is upend the conference table. A customer talks down to you about the poor service she says she received, and you’re unfailingly polite and solicitous, even though you resent being patronized. Or perhaps you simply had a poor night’s sleep, yet you push yourself to remain energetic and upbeat because you’ve been told — more often than you care to count — that “great” leaders bring positivity and inspiration to their team.

Emotional labor is a near universal part of every job, and of life; often it’s just called being polite. However, the extent to which one acts makes a meaningful difference. A person can “deep act” in a way that is still connected with his or her core values and beliefs at work (“Yes, the customer is being patronizing, but I empathize with her and care about solving her problem”) or “surface act” (“I’ll be nice here, but deep down I’m really spitting nails”).

Research shows that the tendency to engage in this latter aspect of emotional labor — surface acting, in which there is a high level of incongruity between what people feel and what they show, either through faking or suppressing their emotions — comes with real costs to the person and the organization. When people habitually evoke the stress of surface acting, they’ll be more prone to depression and anxiety, decreased job performance, and burnout. This has an effect on others, too: Leaders who surface act at work are more likely to be abusive to their employees, by belittling them and invading their privacy, for example. And job stress can spill over into home life. In one study of hotel employees who did a lot of surface acting on the job (“Yes, ma’am, I’d be delighted to bring you a fluffier robe!”) their spouses were more likely to see their partners’ work as a source of conflict and to wish they would find another job, in the hopes that their relationship would be less strained.

There are common contexts in which surface acting comes about, including:

a mismatch between your personality (for example, level of introversion or extroversion) and what is expected from you in your role
a misalignment of values, when what you’re being asked to do doesn’t accord with what you believe in
a workplace culture in which particular ways of expressing emotion (what psychologists call “display rules”) are endorsed — or not
The ideal, of course, would be to work in a job to which you are so well suited that your actions and feelings are always in perfect harmony, eliminating the need for you to be exhaustingly inauthentic all day. In real life, however, the goal of keeping your surface acting to a minimum and instead engaging in deep acting, where the role is aligned with who you truly are, is a more attainable one. Assuming you find meaning in the work you do and don’t feel you’re in the entirely wrong field, here are some things you can do at work to reduce your emotional labor and feel better about the way you’re spending your days.

Remind yourself why you’re in the job you’re in. Connecting to your larger purpose — you are learning skills that are critical to your overall career; you’re in a dull but stable job right now because your children need health insurance and being a good parent is important to you — will help you feel more connected to your work.

Explore “want to” thinking. It’s easy to fall into a “time to make the donuts” mentality, thinking of all work as something you “have to” do. And most of us don’t have the financial resources for work to truly be optional. But allowing yourself to appreciate the aspects of your job that give you a charge — maybe it’s brainstorming with colleagues or making systems more efficient — elevates your work into something you choose to do, rather than something required of you. To be clear, I am not suggesting you “just think positive” or try to rationalize away real concerns. But do become more aware of the subtle traps of language in which work tasks, even ones you might enjoy, are framed as chores. If you can’t find a true “want to” in key components of your work, it may be a sign that change is in order.

Do some job crafting. Consider whether you can work with your manager to tweak your job so that it is more aligned with what is of value to you. For example, if, when you visit the satellite offices of your firm, you’re stimulated by the new people you meet and their different ways of doing things, perhaps you could propose a project that could involve more of these kinds of visits. The goal is to make your job more interesting, so that less emotional labor is required.

When we typically think of stress at work, we focus on time pressures, information overload, and change as the causes. Yet the emotional labor that you invest in your job can be a significant source of demand, and is worth considering and managing.

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1453R wrote:

It’d be interesting to try that Power Framework thing on it, but sadly the ‘what happens’ when frustration sets in is boring – I get frustrated and hope I can find some time to destress. That very lack of options, the inability to do anything whatsoever to alleviate the frustrations of the job, is why stress and frustration is an ever-present thing. I would assume the same applied to many millions of people worldwide – we all need to eat and for most of us that means we need to work, and there’s very few positions in the world that allow one a break from the relentless stressors of whatever position they find. There’s a reason the horrors of Customer Service and Retail jobs are internet-meme legendary, ne?

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1453R wrote:

Dunno if that’s what you wanted, but hey.

A2.) On the above post in general: we keep discovering that everything else about the human brain tends to operate on a spectrum. Why on Earth wouldn’t sanity/mental health work the same way? The human brain is an enormously complex device with thousands if not millions of different variables, assembled haphazardly by the vagaries of evolution and influenced by a turbulent mixing pot of antagonistic forces and factors all trying to prey on you that we call ‘society’. The wonder isn’t the idea that sanity might be more complicated than ‘yes/no’, but that we ever thought it wasn’t more complicated than that.

Brains are literally shades of grey. It is ‘grey matter’. Why would we assume it operates in black and white?

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1453R wrote:

A3.) Assuming the level of super rich that means “will never want for money again no matter how extravagant my expenses”, and with the understanding that this is a ‘fun’ answer rather than a heavy one…once I get done telling my cubicle farm job to piss off forever and paid off my mortgage and stuff, I’d hire some people to run a game store for me. Not a Gamestop or shit, a REAL game store, with tables you play on at the store. Run Magic or D&D or Warmachines or anything else, get a proper goddamned hobby shop in this town. I’d use that endless capacity for money to allow this hobby shop to remain open no matter if it’s making a profit or not – I want a proper fucking hobby shop in my town and if I’m staying in this town with infinite money, I’ll eat the debts gladly to have one that does the job proper.

Also somebody else runs it. I suck at business and I hate it anyways, so they get paid to do it for me. And they would get time off if they needed it or the ability to play cool games in their own store. Because.

Heh. It’s either setting up my own personal hobbyist’s retreat like that or moving somewhere that I can build my own firing range into the backyard. There’s a very nice range within a few miles of my house that I quite enjoy, but it’s run by folks who’re paranoid assholes. Idiot punks with no respect for other people’s things have given the owners ample reason to be paranoid assholes, but they’re still paranoid assholes. I’d love my own range I could build cool little drills and training runs on so I could actually improve my marksmanship, rather than just bench shoot for mild kicks every now and then.

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1453R wrote:

EDIT: Forgot! Gotta ask a question! Uhh...uhhh...uhhhhhhhh...

(If you're a Gun Guy): PCCs - useful and valid options for many civilian applications, or shitty overgrown Glocks? Discuss your reasoning either way.

(If you're not): Have you ever been to a tabletop gaming/hobby shop, or spent significant time pursuing such a hobby? If so, what's your favorite game? If not, why not?

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erdelyii wrote:

A: We Three Kings

Q: Is it snowing?