Posts made by AeriaNyx

Out of the blue, a person from my past came up. Not because the person I was talking to knew them personally, but because this person from my past is now a wildly successful author.

That feeling that followed was intense, because it did not just bring back that sullen, resentful acknowledgement that this person did me wrong (They sort of did, but it was by nature of being an egotistical nightmare who happened to fit the exact type of person who could run rampant over my damaged self, so.) is reaping the rewards of being successful on a level that I don't consider realistic. Like, Hugo award winning, NYT best selling, writing for Spider Gwen and XMen level. It's one of those moments where the world feels unbelievably unfair.

But hot on the heels of that sort of resentment and whinging comes the slow realization that it isn't really their success that sticks in my craw the worst. It's the fact that I know I was the worst version of myself around them. That when they broke me, I became someone that acted in ways I find spectacularly shameful. I lashed out. I was cruel, I was deliberately hurtful. And that is what makes me cringe every time I hear their name. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm still appalled that someone who is such a jerk managed to become a huge success. That's just karmic bullshit right there.

I dunno. In the wake of this, I just feel... lost, I guess. I don't know how to really reconcile the fact that I know I behaved badly with the fact that I still have anger about how I perceive that I was treated. I mean, I'm not beating myself up over it, but it still makes me feel hollow and kinda sick when I think about the whole thing.

Plus it sucks that I can't read Spider Gwen because I refuse to contribute to their continued success. Stupid, maybe. Well. Definitely.

Times like this I feel like a really shitty person.

@silverfox I believe it was Tessa that gave it to him.

So maybe it is something in the water, but man, lately all I want to do is run PrPs. I have a ton of random ideas, some of which are just that, nebulous little content nuggets that I haven't fully worked out in my head. I find that I often need a sounding board, someone to talk things through with. I habitually make things way too complicated and generally need someone to smack me with the KISS stick.

So how about here? Hey, potential PrP runners, have you got something you want to get feedback on? Have tips or tricks for running combat you'd like to share?

Personally, I have this idea brewing to place a chest someone in public and have a journal inside it that gives clues to the next location and so on, like a crazy weird treasure hunt all over the grid. I have no idea to what end this would be. Like, maybe it leads to a camp of bandits? Maybe it leads to a shardhaven/dungeon?

But would it even work? Would it be shared, would it be possible to get a group going, or would it fizzle and not go anywhere? How would I even track it?

What do you guys think?

@thesuntsar said in MU Things I Love:

@Snackness 'The duke's sister...'

I used to get a lot of 'the wife of count Kael'

@ZombieGenesis I should have been more clear about my default misanthropic nature. When I said 'Superman in a realistic world, not a comic book one' I mean that people are assholes, and that if you have a preteen kid with superpowers, shit is going to turn ugly really fast. Like.. I knew it was a horror film. I wasn't expecting him to be a good guy. Though...
***Spoilers!=***

@Jaded Yeah they did. O.O Holy CRAP there were some... just.. wow.

I went to go see Brightburn yesterday, though man it was kinda hard to find a theater running it. From the trailer my initial thought was 'Oh, so it's a Superman movie set in a realistic setting, rather than in a comic-book type world'. And it was... and it wasn't.

The Good:
The premise itself is fantastically interesting. I am shocked that we haven't really had a superhero/horror crossover before. The effects were very sparingly used so it felt real in a way a lot of the CGI heavy movies don't. It had pretty decent acting. By that I mean, the actors themselves did a good job with what they had. Which takes me to...

The Bad:
When my husband, who is a writer comes out of the theater and says "I really hate using this word to describe writing a creative endeavor, but god damn was that some lazy writing." then there is definitely something off. There were so many narrative shortcuts taken, and it relied really heavily on the score (Complete with the ubiquitous BWAAAAAAHN) to try to influence the scariness, or provoke emotion. There are some incredibly heavy handed foreshadowing bits early on, and if there is a setup to a cliched horror shot (person looks forward, sees villain, looks away, looks forward, sees villain, looks away VILLAIN IS IN FRONT OF YOU) they pretty much took it. The Meg did a really good job of subverting cliched expectations. And if I'm using The Meg as an example of a better writing... Yikes?

I don't think this movie is going to do well enough to spawn a sequel, which given the credits sequence is a damned shame, because holy crap would I love to see those threads followed. All in all I think it is a super fascinating premise that would have been far better served with taking their time and really digging into it more, rather than floating on the surface of stereotypical horror.

Updated! Sort of.

@Arkandel Oh, I totally agree with that. I mean, that's what I get out of the hobby -- but just because I recognize how I use it, doesn't give me the right to spew my baggage on other people! Oh hell no. I'm an adult human being, and I can't, like you said, always control how I feel, but I can damn well control how I behave. I hope my RP doesn't come across as my slapdash therapy experiments to other people. People who RP with me aren't signing up for that shit. They are signing up for happy fun time and I try to ensure that that is the experience I give. I just then spend a ton of time afterwards self-analyzing and picking things apart when I see something in the pattern of my PC's behavior that strikes me as something important.

Now, there are the rare occurrences in which I find people I just do not gel with. I can think of one such person, who I genuinely like as a person, but if I try to RP with them, my emotional state just flips into entirely irrational. So I avoid them. Not because I don't like them, not because I don't like their character. I just know that I cannot trust my behavior around them. I am more than happy to accept that onus and try to leave it be as much as possible. Because, adult.

For me, the answer is mixed. I mean, overall the answer must be yes, or I wouldn't dedicate so much of my headspace and time to it.

In a lot of ways, I treat mushing as my therapy. I have a profound amount of emotional disconnect in my day to day life. If you ask me how I am, or how I am feeling there is a high probability I wouldn't be able to fully answer. But when I play a character, it almost always provides me insight into where my emotional triggers are. When they are happy, I feel happy. When they are devastated, I am devastated. I get a lot of emotional release out of it. It also helps me quantify what upsets me in a way that remains nebulous and ephemeral in the real world.

The problems I run into are, however, that my insecurities are often heightened and my social paranoia tends to be much more powerful given the lack of contextual information via body language and tone. So people who are naturally more brusque/curt immediately twig my 'I did something wrong, they are mad at me oh no oh no' triggers. So then it becomes a dance of self-awareness of my personal issues and the persistent, nagging belief that there IS something wrong I just have to keep digging until I find it (or create it by said persistent digging).

I am also a people pleaser who seeks outside validation like an addict. So, there are a lot of pay offs in terms of running things for people, or crafting things for people. Until I burn out.

For me the hobby is filled with extremes. Excellent highs, horribad lows. I'm slowly teaching myself how to find the balance. And I think that is one of my favorite things about this hobby. The opportunity it offers me to grow as a person. While at the same time losing myself in neat worlds and cool characters.

@Ghost And most of the dialog is written in iambic pentameter.

@Ghost YEEEEEEES. Deadwood was where I fell in love with Ian McShane. There are some seriously hilarious cussing compilations from Deadwood. AND, my all time favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f31PLcCXD0U Deadwood Pancakes.

I should note: NSFW language. Deadwood.

To second @Sparks, when you have a reeeeally out there idea, and you spend days working it out and layering in things and really working hard to make things make sense. And you finally get to the day you have to run it, and not only are the players awesome, but they pick up on what you're trying to do and they just make it glorious.

I have really, really, started to discover that my favorite part of MU*ing is running stories for people. I was so honored to be trusted with a really important goal for a character and just watching them go through it was so gratifying.

Now. If i could just get better at guesstimating timing. What I thought would take about 4 hours, ended up taking nearly 12. And kudos to them for sticking with it that long! It was probably the most fun I've had in months. It was all of the warm and fuzzies.

I actually lost an RL friend of three years over recycled characters. She's the one who got me into MU*ing in the first place and is directly responsible for introducing me to the guy I wound up marrying.

I met this girl in college and she invited me to join in my first TT rpg. Vampire the Masquerade. It was a group made up of, admittedly, the fringe-element in my dorm, but I was like... what the hell! I fell in love with it, it was so much fun. We eventually went from Vampire, to Aberrant, to CyberPunk to D&D. They'd been trying to get me to try mushing for at least 2.5 years before I finally decided in the wake of a terrible break up to give it a try.

I was fucking hooked. Flash forward about four to six months and I was invited to be Wiz-staff on a game in development. I was highly flattered and in retrospect this was such a phenomenally BAD idea... but it was what it was. The #1 rule of the game was that there were absolutely no transfer characters allowed. Now, I'd been playing games with this girl for over 3 years, and she had, at most... 3 different characters. She would create variants to play on other games. The Gwydion Sidhe would turn into a Tremere Ghoul. The name desc and backstory was always the same. Anyway, she wanted to play this character on the game I was staffing on, and I told her the Goddess didn't like transfers but I'd ask. The word came back no, so I told my friend. Who then proceeded to Flip. The. Fuck. Out. She went off. She told me I was a terrible friend, couldn't believe what a manipulative shit I was, how juvenile and petty I was. She said she never wanted to speak to me again. And... she more or less hasn't. She completely cut me off from herself, deliberately sabotaged my relationship with another friend by flat out lying.

It was actually pretty damn devastating.

Ho.Lee.Shitballs!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt9L1jCKGnE&feature=youtu.be

I cannot wait for the new Spider-Man movie.

@Auspice

**** Because anything can be spoilery ****

***=NSFW content***