Best posts made by Aria

@mietze said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:

I will admit that the only celebrity that I actually cried on reading that they’d died was Fred Rogers. By all accounts he seemed like the real deal.

Mr. Rogers and Robin Williams, but the latter was both a blend of him being a beloved childhood figure (bangarang!), followed by being a "we listened to stand-up on all my college roadtrips" hero, and the fact that I was just barely starting to crawl out of one of the worst depressions of my life when he died. Depression does stupid things to your brain and somehow, mine convinced me that it was horribly unfair that someone like me was getting better, and someone like him who had made so many millions of people happy didn't, and that it should've been the other way around. I ugly-snot-cried every night when I got home for, like, a week solid after that.

Having since discovered some of the amazing things he did -- very quietly -- for people less fortunate than him has made me slightly less embarrassed about that one, because apparently Robin Williams was also a stupidly good person. (And if any of you have evidence to the contrary, please for the love of God just shut it and let me have this one, okay??)

@Ghost said in MU Things I Love:

@Cupcake I sometimes used musicians as PBs. A few years back I saw maybe 3 concerts (in one year) that included musicians I'd used as PBs. In my head it was kind of awkward (how weird would it be to high five someone you'd used as a PB, right?), but it was still pretty lulz.

So this isn't thread necromancy so much as it is post necromamcy because new job has eaten my brain and I haven't checked this thread in ages. Whatever. But. BUT.

The year you were playing Noble, as PB Josh Homme, and we had that super massive black hole of a blow out....

Queens of the Stone Age came to Philly. And I had an amazing view. We were so close to the stage!! The show was SO FUCKING GOOD. And SO FUCKING AWKWARD. So awkward. So. Awkward.

"This is fantastic!" Pause. "Goddamn that ginger bastard and his stupid face." Pause. "But aggggh, Feel Good Hit of the Summer."

Also, I literally fell down my front steps and broke my foot the next day. This is totally unrelated, but I'm going to mention it anyway because then I can be like "When @Ghost ends a friendship, he really means it."

@sockmonkey said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Does anyone have some really really reeeeeeally intro stuff about retirement planning? Not just the planning part but how to actually get the money into those funds? Do I..just go to the bank? Can I do it online? Aaaaaargh getting old noooooo.

I have some money I need to invest but I have no idea how to do this. I know that for my needs, I do not need to waste money on a financial advisor to manage my cash -- I should just park it somewhere. But financial matters seriously make my eyes cross and I have trouble even using the retirement calculator on Vanguard. My retirement plan at this point is to get dementia so I don't realize that I'm living in a dumpster.

Message me. Seriously. I work in one of several marketing and communications departments (yeah, legit, we have.... five? one for each of our business lines) at one of the largest investment firms in the US. (In the world, actually, as we have several trillion AUM.) And the most ethical one, IMO, specifically because of its weird ownership structure. And no, I don't say that because I work there. I took a paycut to work there, specifically because of how impressed I was by their treatment of average investors and the fact that they've quietly supported the fiduciary rule for yeeeeeeeeeeeears, kind of in the exact opposite manner of the fuckheads that caused the mortage meltdown. (If you don't know what that 'fiduciary rule' is, look that up. And if you're an American, be horrified that this isn't required by regulation or law. Seriously. Then call your 401K provider and be like, "The fuck?")

Now, I cannot legally give you financial advice, because I'm not FINRA licensed. In fact, I could very much be fired from my company for doing so because that's a great big fat no-no. And I do not want to be fired from my company because, like.... I enjoy eating and having a place to sleep and stuff. But I can probably walk you through the basics of what those funny words in your company's retirement plans are if you have one, or how to set up an IRA (that's Individual Retirement Account) for you if you don't.

And if it turns out you need an IRA, I'll give the Friends & Family hotline for my company if you want it. It's set up so that people who work at the company but aren't in a licensed role -- like me and pretty much my entire department -- can give it out to, well, friends and family who ask them for financial advice. (No, we do not receive any sort of commission for this. It's literally just to keep us in compliance, so we don't accidentally break the law by trying to help you. The only money I can make off my friends there is a referral bonus for people they hire.)

If you have a retirement plan through your employer, you're pretty much stuck with whatever your benefits team picked for you, unless you want to open an IRA on top of that.

@AeriaNyx You can't see it because I pretty much only write black journals at this point (when I remember to write them at all), but it's now been documented for the sake of history that the Riven laundress is going to give her a good what-for about getting bits of hay and goat-smell all over a velvet gown, and the Keatons are the only people worth that trouble.

Sometimes my brain does really dumb, awful things to me. And then sometimes my brain does really amazing, wonderful things.

Like the ridiculous shit it spits out at me first thing in the morning, pre-caffeine.

I received an email from an activist named Dan Doubet. Somehow, my morning-brain interpreted that as "Dan Douchebat." IDEFK, but sure, brain. We're going to go with Dan Douchebat. Because Dan Douchebat is amazing.

99% on my home laptop. I won't use the webclient from my work computer given how heavily monitored usage is at my company and while I will pop on from my phone to check things occasionally, the connection sucks, the screen is too small, and touchscreen typing makes me want to shove a fork into my eye.

@cupcake Remember, the age difference rule is "divide in half, then add seven". If they're older than that, you're fine.

@Auspice said in PC vs Player Assumptions:

I try asking people what their goal is.

^ This. It's been many years since I've sat down and STed on a game for anything but tiny PRPs I spend the whole time worrying I'm failing at, since I'm way, way, WAY better at all of the 'behind the scenes' of staffing (world building, overarching metaplot writing, job processing) than I am at live GMing, but....

Yeah. That's pretty much always been my solution. If you're way off base and straying over yonder, I'll ask.

If you want to Do the Thing But Don't Know How, just message me and I'll spitball a few options with you. It may not be a quick and easy "Do #1, #2, #3, wiggle your butt once and wish really hard and then you can have the prize!", but I will cheerfully do a version of 'Here are a few ways you can approach this and/or here are the minimum requirements so snag them however you want'. Generally having an open-door policy about that and answering any questions they had with a pre-announced and firmly set boundary of "I will explain anything you want re: theme or decisions or plot, but this is not an invitation to try and argue me into changing it" seemed to prevent most issues. At least from my perspective, anyway. My players may have disagreed.

My RP bestie of several years was just left by his partner of most of a decade.

He is too far away to give a "Do you kinda need to shove your face in my boobs right now?" hug.

This upsets me.

So in last night's PRP, I discovered that my normally quite cool, formal, and distant character, when stripped of her weapon, barely conscious, and on the verge of being murdered.....

Will resort to biting someone until they bleed.

I find this incredibly funny and am more than a little bit pleased about this. Mia Riven -- SHAV BITER.

@faceless I agree! Though he'd probably just sniff it to see if it's food, and then ignore it. Like he does with many things.

At the moment, he's wearing his Christmas bandana. @insomniac7809 refers to it as his 'ascot' in an attempt to compensate for the lack of monocle.

@Auspice said in Fantasy Avatar Generator:

@thesuntsar said in Fantasy Avatar Generator:

@silverfox said in Fantasy Avatar Generator:

Norwood, though I might go fiddle around with him more.

lol he looks so concerned

is there any other way for Norwood to look?

Disapproving.

@packrat said in Um...What?:

I am guessing that the guy equivalent is going on a date then finding that the woman you are with talks about nothing but how she wants babies and how she keeps getting fired from her various attempts at having a job, with bonus racism.

She did have some pretty good cooking tips though?

I am immediately picturing the scene from "I Just Had Sex" where they sing 'I think she might've been a racist' and it cuts to an image of her Klan hood in her bedroom. >.<

I couldn't resist and did Mia on the same battlefield as Thesarin.

@three-eyed-crow said in Good TV:

@aria
Post your reaction to The Good Place finale.

It's my current Best Thing and the second season's even better, tho not all up anywhere expect On Demand right now.

A friend and I talking about someone we both know behind their back.

It basically devolves into a competition over which one of us has more compliments about how they're nicest, and kindest, and generally just the keenest.

@thenomain said in Good TV:

@aria

Wait until you get to Season 2. You'll be all:

.....Season 3 nao, plz.

....thanks to autocorrect, I just accidentally asked my friend if he would like to "Play at Sex, maybe."

FML.

We have no internet for the second night in a row.

Works just fine during the day, but somehow, there manages to be an outage that starts before I get home.

"Fuck you, Comcast," she said from her teeny phone keyboard.

@testament said in The Woodward Agency:

I have no horse in this, but is having a city of 1 million people important to the game? Genuine question. I live in a city of 500k and I can tell you it's definitely pretty damn big.

In relation to this, what sort of feel are you going for?

I ask because if it's "quiet stretches of big woodsy areas where creepy shit happens", which often seems to be what game-runners are going for when they pick Maine, that can be hard to balance against a city with a massive population.

You would probably need a pretty big grid to do it! Or at least a grid that describes being stretched out over a pretty big swath of land. Otherwise things start getting weird like they did on the Reach.