https://imgur.com/a/eWlMhHh

I've cycled through these 3 songs for a good while now

The Saltwater Room- Owl City [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AllgoKzRA8]

Sunburn- Owl City [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4aArJMHqVU]

Hello Seattle- Owl City [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBtdQNPG3jk]

Dungeons and Dragons/other roleplaying games; a lot of the people I've met through D&D are really interesting and passionate; hoping to find some people interested in the Battletech roleplaying games in specific at this point though.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/677301429190262795/1070030453911855124/IMG_6476.jpg

just ordered my new glasses, i can look even goofier now.

As another autistic person, allow me to overthink for you.

Yes too clinical, but more so though it comes off as a bit too, assuming per say of your understanding of zheep's identity and the situation in question; and is also a bit offensive.

But also: trying to tie the usage of a slur to one's identity upsets other people; and can kinda comes off as an attempted justification of it, rather than a well intended explanation. and regardless, it's not really something that one
would necessarily want to try and justify using what you think as a baseline.

Simply put, It's a battle that the person using the slur/term in question should have to answer for, if others are judging them. You're not really gonna win that fight for them, and you're just going to open yourself up to judgement regardless of what your intent is. Morally speaking it's probably for the best that they have to deal with it, and not you.

Also the phrasing and way the post was structured is very memeable and seeing how others use your post as a template can kinda be an indication of what upsets them or what makes it easy to mock; by looking at the core of what followup posts are based on.
IE : "the context of the post (speaking strangely about black people)", somewhat indicates how it's received, and with that wording you can look back at your own post and see what could be interpreted that way by comparing.

Best thing you can do is just learn from it and not to try to further explain it here tbh, sucks but it's a good learning opportunity.

Allow me to frame it like this, as a certified Rahmed Interpreter.
Rahmed is eccentric and plays in multiple regions, cares a lot about the game
Rahmed wants you to play in or know about teams and players from multiple regions, and tries to get a project going to list this all in one centralized place
Note the line "This is for EU, NA, Asia and Ozfortress teams (can also do SA teams if the demand is there)"

The hypothetical reason to use this over etf2l is because this isn't just about etf2l
It is important to note that division spreadsheets are not an uncommon practice from higher division to division in na or eu, atleast with hl as an example

Now I'm not saying that this is going to be a project of any significance nor is it a realistic venture per se; but I'd prefer to give my brother the benefit of the doubt here.

As someone who has played in multiple regions, I'd find it interesting to think about and it isn't really hurting anyone by it's existence. I do think it's a bit unrealistic to expect this to have that much impact or need for existence, but imo the best results come from people who are willing to invest a large amount of time into things without much gain in sight. More interest and awareness across regions is never a bad thing, and it's something that might only come meaningfully from such people who don't really care about practical returns. I mean the man has spent half his life force on pugs ffs.

Yeah the man is over his head tho, you're on planet Rahmed now. you gotta assume that he kinda knows that himself when coming into this i'd think. don't know what sort of eldritch sorcery he has planned to force people to cooperate with him on it tho.

I don't use the tftv forums much but I am greatly expanding the scope of my project. I got kinda inspired by the
pinguefy video; and on the side of the normal interviews I want to collect video/audio submissions to tackle specific topics. That being said, the form I've made should help manage the series as a whole a bit better. I have a witness interview going live on friday talking a lot about witness gaming, and I did get around to interviewing vanxi, arcadia and nabla as well. honestly though i've been a little lacking on my 6s game and that's something i'm still looking at covering more of along with eu.

So anyways, the first of these side projects I want to delve into is one covering caffeine. I like overthinking things and I think caffeine usage is something that everyone's gonna have a lot of drastically differing opinions and experiences with. I'm not looking to come across as objective or anything, regardless i'm super excited to see what the commonalities are, and I think these questions give a lot of room for personal takes. I get they're not all encompassing and a fair few of them aren't really applicable to everyone; but I'm wanting to see the perceived impact caffeine has here; and feel free to answer whichever questions out of the bunch you want. if you really want to you can leave text responses on the form ig.
also if i made any errors lmk all of this has fried my brain rn

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/907424893417709582/1002302287433187328/unknown.png

Accepting submissions along with many other things in the following form.
https://forms.gle/E6QC5paVyRBR2bFf6

This was a good lan.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/623433454872428544/990824024563150898/IMG_6132.jpg

A lot of people end up cringing out and will grind this game while trying to say they don't care about it and the community. while the whole save tf2 notion might not persuade valve, it'll certainly have the potential to inspire people to actually do things as a community instead of being emo and hopeless while still clearly involving themselves in the community.

As to that I'd point to how many content creators there are getting behind this. While that may not mean as much to us, it's much more likely to mean something to more casual audiences and their fanbase. Regardless of how well it turns out on paper, it shows us what we can do as a community when we come together and unite rather than letting ourselves continually fragment.

In all fairness it's probably more about getting closure, and a potential lack sense of closure from valve responding/continuing to not respond to all of this is what's needed to get people to realize that we have to become self reliant as a community, it's absolutely a good thing. Games without dedicated servers or official casual scenes are able to live on their own, as the community does their best to keep itself alive.

It really is just time for people to ask themselves why they're still here, and to find their own answers. If yours is to state that we're doomed and to point out the meaningless of this all for the sake of realism, that's fine but telling the people who do care to not care goes nowhere. It's never going to be about the practicality of things; as is the case with the majority of online communities.

i mean idk if making less than the minimum wage from competitive is your prerogative, that's cool tho. it's just always about the unique social opportunities that being involved with these games are, and it's infinitely more cringe to show that you don't care than it is to admit that you care in some form and to show that's why you're still here. the fact that we all partake in these discussions and or play the game shows that we still care in some shape or form, and that's the only realism to be found here.

And even if this does nothing in a social sense directly, the content creators aren't gonna just stop milking this. however valve responds is gonna give them fuel, and they're gonna redirect the lack of a response towards their own community servers and advertising them; stuff like that. I mean look at most drama focused content creators and how they like to keep revisiting topics. there's attention and profit to be made from seeming like a person who's doing good is all i mean to say. and now there's the opportunity for them to do it in synchronization with dozens of other content creators all with their own audiences; and that's another angle for a bit of our issue to get alleviated at some point.

All i mean to say, is that these people are giving us a chance to do more things ourselves. if you don't realize that, the only person you have to blame is yourself. it doesn't have to mean much to you, but you gotta see what it might mean to others here. with all the goodwill, discussion, and cohesion around, it's basically the best time one can have to spread awareness about whatever they want to.

TLDR: Be as realistic as you want, but don't act like you're being more realistic than anyone else here lmfao. look for the good and you'll find it together, look for the bad and you'll find a thousand more things to try to critique to the help of absolutely no one.

how do we feel about potential in person interviews at the upcoming philly lan btw? still working out the details atm but i feel like it could be super interesting to do that with a higher quality mic

yeah for sure, i have some adv-newer inv hl players scheduled atm, do you have any recommendations for 6s players?

Hey so I recently started a series of voice interviews focusing on players and their perspective and experiences in the tf2 community and sorta just giving people a voice; letting them say what they need to in an easily accessible audio sort of way. A lot of these focus on the experiences of staff and older players at the moment, and the majority of the people covered are highlander players.
That being said, I am very interested in giving 6s players more coverage but I don't know many myself. I figured I'd post here and see if it's something people'd be interested in. I'm mostly interested in the past vs the present, community concerns and things people think need to change and what can improve. We usually try to look at the root of any sorts of happenings rather than focusing on drama itself, and always try to reach conclusions together from it.

Some of the videos are more self contained than others, but a huge recurring theme is allowing for people to communicate concerns collectively, and laying down the groundwork for others to build off of. So an example of this would be with things such as senses of class identity in the past for highlander, and attempting to revive more cooperation between players of classes to do things like the old round tables. Another example would be covering a content creator and touching on their own experiences with rgl (Likely uploading this upcoming week), and going over that with other content creators to explore the possibility of leagues cooperating further with the community to make up for the shortcomings of the leagues.

The last main recurrence is building on the idea of cross-regional cooperation and the potential benefits of it; which usually is discussed with players regions with more issues and less resources available. All of this sorts of stuff frequently gets covered, but the interviews are always heavily individualized and not all of them are going to be inherently heavy when it comes to the tone.

The current majority is North American players, but I have interest in covering other regions, and do have content for other regions already up at the moment/on the upload schedule. As stated before, I would really enjoy getting the perspective of more 6s players, and European players out there. I do have Australian ones on the way covering concerns with the influence of their server provider on the administration of their league, one with an Asian covering Highlander league concerns and corruption on the way, as well as a South American one focusing on issues the region faces, the benefits of cross regional cooperation; and what it's like playing in North America as an out of region player. The more regions and the more perspectives, the better in my books. they all got their own unique sets of issues, experiences, and concerns to discus.

I know there's been some sort of stuff like this via series like the coaches corner in the past, and I feel like my approach is differentiated by my investment and concern for the larger tf2 community. I also think that the visual-audio format really helps when it comes to humanizing people, especially staff who don't get the chance to fairly lay out their reasoning without falling on deaf ears. A main goal with the series is comfort and I always try to work with the other person, without trying to conflict with whatever stories they have to tell.

I think that everyone is deserving of a chance to have their voice heard, and that people's chances are how they treat others in the community. If I do not believe someone has malicious intent in mind, I am complete fine with them expressing whatever they want to, and letting other people be the judge of them. That being said, please do not harass the people in question over their views, they have a right to them and have drawn their conclusions for a reason; reasons you get to hear right from them. By cutting out the larger community as a middle man, you get a much deeper level of insight into the other person.

I do get that the notion of everyone deserving a voice is cliche, but seriously a lot of the time we just never end up having the chance to express a lot of our concerns in a way that other people can actually understand and process. This especially applies across different regions, where in some cases a league's power is it's ability to control it's playerbase due to a smaller player size.

I think the biggest benefit to all of this though, is compartmentalizing all of these experiences and making competitive seem much more accessible and human to casual players, which could be a really good thing that helps to revitalize interest and build a better sense of community going forward. Regardless of this, it is interesting to have a centralized source covering a lot of these differing issues across leagues, in the eyes of each individual person. I imagine people at the very least would find it fun to watch ones covering their own friends.

I welcome any judgement you might throw my way, I recognize that I'm just one guy with some of my own biases, and that these are not that professional. I will say, the quality drastically picks up with the sixth episode and beyond, but I still think the prior interviews have valid experiences.

These are unscripted, and all it ends up meaning is that it's a challenge to myself to always be building on things and putting my full effort in, rather than ever having the opportunity to slack off at all. I really want to get people's stories out there, and so I am always glad to give it my all. As long as you don't have ill will in mind, I am more than glad to work with you and talk about whatever community topics you're passionate about. In the future, I plan on branching out to casual audiences. Overworking is no concern here, I am glad to do as many interviews as possible. I'd love to get your story out there.

New episodes come up every Mon/Wed/Fri at 12 pm EST, with timestamps prepared ahead of time. General sorts of information about what the interviewing and the process of it entails can be found below.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/875735363992305715/972668112577134633/unknown.png

Playlist of previous episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdRm-mx1l55TcKUFPU-lKj9w1dnAm8f46
Guests include: Ire, Ac130, Darzie/Wolfteeth, And American/Danny. Next week you can expect to see videos about Maven and Baconblitz. If you don't know any of these people, you might find it interesting to hear about them and what they have to offer.

I would strongly recommend viewing the American interview as the best example of the what the soul of the series is, and I believe it to be the highest quality one yet.

If any of this interests you, feel free to reach out to me at
https://steamcommunity.com/id/Bliztank
Bliztank#1499
https://discord.gg/qZT7faBwbq

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/677301429190262795/914283585136107600/IMG_4596.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/765778252261359656/893899346804879360/image0.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/764926425680707598/915657221646450728/IMG_4616.png
unfortunately i am no longer in the 0.001% of owl city fans

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/764926425680707598/915657444619874324/oc2.jpg
this was last year's

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/764926425680707598/915657825202601994/IMG_4619.jpg

cu@